Astrobiology Web

Using an idealised general circulation model, we investigate the atmospheric circulation of Earth-like terrestrial planets in a variety of orbital configurations.

Earth, Mars, and Venus, irradiated by an evolving Sun, have had fascinating but diverging histories of habitability. Although only Earth's surface is considered to be habitable today, all three planets might have simultaneously been habitable early in their histories.

In the last decade, about a dozen giant exoplanets have been directly imaged in the IR as companions to young stars.

On planets near M dwarfs, photosynthesis (PS) will occur with an effectiveness which depends on the supply of visible photons with wavelengths between 400 and 700 nm. In this paper, we quantify the effectiveness of PS in two contexts which are relevant for M dwarfs.

The banded iron formation, located in western China, has been conclusively dated as Cambrian in age. Approximately 527 million years old, this formation is young by comparison to the majority of discoveries to date.

Last autumn, the world was excited by the discovery of an exoplanet called Ross 128 b, which is just 11 light-years away from Earth.

Earth's oxygen levels rose and fell more than once hundreds of millions of years before the planetwide success of the Great Oxidation Event about 2.4 billion years ago, new research from the University of Washington shows.

Carbon-enriched rocky exoplanets have been proposed around dwarf stars as well as around binary stars, white dwarfs and pulsars. However, the mineralogical make up of such planets is poorly constrained.

inds of many evolutionary biologists, the continents were irrelevant early in the Earth's history, because they are assumed to have been barren of life until the first plants appeared, around 0.4 billion years ago.

A new instrument to search for potentially habitable/inhabited planets has started operation at the Subaru Telescope. This instrument, IRD (InfraRed Doppler), will look for habitable planets around red dwarf stars.