A 1,000 year-old Buddhist statue discovered by a Nazi expedition to Tibet in 1938 has been analyzed by scientists and found to be carved from a rare ataxite meteorite. Details of how the provenance of the relic was established have been published in Meteoritics and Planetary Science. The statue, known as the Iron Man, weighs […]
NASA scientist Richard B. Hoover has sparked controversy with claims that he has identified bacterial microfossils in several meteorites. If proved correct, the implications are that life is common throughout the universe, and that life on Earth may have come from other planets. Hoover’s paper is set to be published in The Journal of Cosmology […]
All life on Earth uses “left-handed” amino acids to build proteins and NASA has now found that a greater number of asteroids were capable of creating these left-handed amino acids than previously thought. In March 2009, researchers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center reported the discovery ofan excess of the left-handed form of the amino […]
Researchers have discovered an unusual kind of meteorite in the Western Australian desert and thanks to an experimental camera network, were able to uncover exactly where in the solar system it came from. Meteorites can provide valuable information about the conditions that existed when the early solar system was being formed. However, information about where […]
Panspermia, the theory that life on Earth may have evolved from simple bacteria that arrived via meteorite is still a hotly debated topic amongst astrobiologists, but an important new discovery indicates that the basic building blocks of life – known as nucleobases – may be a far more likely extraterrestrial contender for kick-starting life on […]
