Life may have emerged billions of years earlier than previously thought
A new study suggests that water first appeared in the universe just a couple of hundred million years after the Big Bang, meaning life may have emerged billions of years earlier than previously thought.
A major collision 4.5 billion years ago with the protoplanet Theia formed the Earth-Moon system and several additional moons
Most scientists agree that a major collision 4.5 billion years ago with the protoplanet Theia formed the Earth-Moon system. A new study from the University of Nevada argues that the chaos of that collision in the early days of the Earth-Moon system may have created polar cislunar “moons.”
LUCA – the new universally recognized ancestor of all life on Earth
New research suggests that all life today descended from a cell that lived 4.2 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the Earth formed. This last universal common ancestor, affectionately nicknamed LUCA by biologists, wasn’t all that different from the fairly complex bacteria that exist today — and it lived in an ecosystem teeming with other life and viruses.