Methane
Lessons From Ancient Earth’s Atmosphere: From Hostile to Hospitable
Will we ever understand how life got started on Earth? We've learned much about Earth's long, multi-billion-year history, but a…
Experimental Radar Technique Reveals the Composition of Titan’s Seas
The Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn generated so much data that giving it a definitive value is impossible. It's sufficient to…
New Answers for Mars’ Methane Mystery
Planetary scientists perk up whenever methane is mentioned. Methane is produced by living things on Earth, so it's considered to…
What Can Early Earth Teach Us About the Search for Life?
Earth is the only life-supporting planet we know of, so it's tempting to use it as a standard in the…
Is the JWST Now an Interplanetary Meteorologist?
The JWST keeps one-upping itself. In the telescope's latest act of outdoing itself, it examined a distant exoplanet to map…
A Cold Brown Dwarf is Belching Methane Into Space
Brown dwarfs span the line between planets and stars. By definition, a star must be massive enough for hydrogen fusion…
The LIFE Telescope Passed its First Test: It Detected Biosignatures on Earth.
We know that there are thousands of exoplanets out there, with many millions more waiting to be discovered. But the…
Another Explanation for K2-18b? A Gas-Rich Mini-Neptune with No Habitable Surface
Exoplanet K2-18b is garnering a lot of attention. James Webb Space Telescope spectroscopy shows it has carbon and methane in…
Could Life Exist in Molecular Clouds?
Our search for life beyond Earth is still in its infancy. We're focused on Mars and, to a lesser extent,…
Wow. JWST Just Found Methane in an Exoplanet Atmosphere
If there's one chemical that causes excitement in the search for biosignatures on other worlds, it's methane. It's not a…