oxygen tagged posts

MIT scientists say that the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE), a period that scientists believe marked the beginning of oxygen’s permanent presence in the atmosphere, started as early as 2.33 billion years ago.

Today, 21% of the air we breathe is made up of molecular oxygen. But this gas was not always in such ample, life-sustaining supply, and in fact was largely absent from the atmosphere for the first 2 billion years of Earth’s history. When, then, did oxygen first accumulate in the atmosphere? MIT team reports that the Earth’s atmosphere experienced the first significant, irreversible influx of oxygen as early as 2.33 billion years ago. This period marks the start of the Great Oxygenation Event, which was followed by further increases later in Earth’s history.

The scientists have also de...

An optical image of the brightest globular cluster, Omega Centauri, a group of over ten million stars older than the Sun. Astronomers have developed a new computational method to determine the abundance of oxygen in these and similar stars, and in particular in giant stars. The code finds values that are more self-consistent than previous estimates. Credit: Joaquin Polleri & Ezequiel Etcheverry, Observatorio Panameño en San Pedro de Atacama

Oxygen is the 3rd most abundant element in the universe, after hydrogen and helium. It is an important constituent of the clouds of gas and dust in space, especially when combined in molecules with other atoms like carbon, and it is from this interstellar material that new stars and planets develop...

Abiogenesis: blue-green algae in a hot spring, Yellowstone National Park

Earth’s oxygen-rich atmosphere emerged in whiffs from a kind of blue-green algae in shallow oceans around 2.5 billion years ago, according to new research from Canadian and US scientists. These whiffs of oxygen likely happened in the following 100 million years, changing the levels of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere until enough accumulated to create a permanently oxygenated atmosphere around 2.4 billion years ago – a transition widely known as the Great Oxidation Event.

The team presents new isotopic data showing that a burst of oxygen production by photosynthetic cyanobacteria temporarily increased oxygen concentrations in Earth’s atmosphere...