rocky exoplanets tagged posts

Aided by microbes found in the subarctic conditions of Canada’s Hudson Bay, an international team of scientists has created the first color catalog of icy planet surface signatures to uncover the existence of life in the cosmos.

As ground-based and space telescopes get larger and can probe the atmosphere of rocky exoplanets, astronomers need a color-coded guide to compare them and their moons to vibrant, tinted biological microbes on Earth, which may dominate frozen worlds that circle different stars.

But researchers need to know what microbes that live in frigid places on Earth look ...

Researchers at the University of Oxford uncover the importance of iron for the development of complex life on Earth – which also may hint at the likelihood of complex life on other planets.

Iron is an essential nutrient that almost all life requires to grow and thrive. Iron’s importance goes all the way back to the formation of the planet Earth, where the amount of iron in the Earth’s rocky mantle was ‘set’ by the conditions under which the planet formed and went on to have major ramifications for how life developed...

Mass-Radius Relation for Rocky Planets Based on PREM Credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Every school kid learns the basic structure of the Earth: a thin outer crust, a thick mantle, and a Mars-sized core. But is this structure universal? Will rocky exoplanets orbiting other stars have the same 3 layers? New research suggests that the answer is yes – they will have interiors very similar to Earth.

Zeng et al applied a computer model Preliminary Reference Earth Model (PREM), which is the standard model for Earth’s interior. They adjusted it to accommodate different masses and compositions, and applied it to 6 known rocky exoplanets with well-measured masses and physical sizes...