Related papers: When did Life Likely Emerge on Earth in an RNA-Fir…

Life arose on Earth sometime in the first few hundred million years after the young planet had cooled to the point that it could support water-based organisms on its surface. The early emergence of life on Earth has been taken as evidence…

Despite great advances in our understanding of the formation of the Solar System, the evolution of the Earth, and the chemical basis for life, we are not much closer than the ancient Greeks to an answer of whether life has arisen and…

The origin of life might be sparked by the polymerization of the first RNA molecules in Darwinian ponds during wet-dry cycles. The key life-building block ribose was found in carbonaceous chondrites. Its exogenous delivery onto the Hadean…

The RNA World hypothesis predicts that self-replicating RNAs evolved before DNA genomes and coded proteins. Despite widespread support for the RNA World, self-replicating RNAs have yet to be identified in a natural context, leaving a key…

Primordial, or Pop III, supernovae (SNe) were the first, great nucleosynthetic engines in the Universe, forging the heavy elements required for the later formation of planets, and life. Past studies suggest that the rise of planet formation…

Here, we ask a simple question, i.e. "at what cosmic time, at the earliest, did life first appear in the universe?" Given what we know about the universe today, there may be some partial answers to this question, but much will still have to…

It is generally accepted that silicate-metal (`rocky') planet formation relies on coagulation from a mixture of sub-Mars sized planetary embryos and (smaller) planetesimals that dynamically emerge from the evolving circum-solar disc in the…

The Earth's Moon is thought to have formed by an impact between the Earth and an impactor around 4.5 billion years ago. This impact could have been so energetic that it could have mixed and homogenized the Earth's mantle. However, this view…

Light volatile elements in lunar regolith are thought to be a mixture of the solar wind and Earth's atmosphere, the latter sourced in the absence of geomagnetic field. However, the extent to which both the current and primitive geodynamo…

The Earth's Moon is thought to have formed from a circumterrestrial disk generated by a giant impact between the proto-Earth and an impactor approximately 4.5 billion years ago. Since the impact was energetic, the disk would have been hot…

There is growing evidence that the Sun might have formed within a nebula impacted by at least one SNR. In this scenario, ejecta and shocks from SNRs may have provided the elements on which life as we know it is based. Investigating the…

Is life most likely to emerge at the present cosmic time near a star like the Sun? We address this question by calculating the relative formation probability per unit time of habitable Earth-like planets within a fixed comoving volume of…

The origin of life and the origin of the universe are among the most important problems of science and they might be inextricably linked. Hydro-gravitational-dynamics (HGD) cosmology predicts hydrogen-helium gas planets in clumps as the…

We explore the likelihood that early remains of Earth, Mars, and Venus have been preserved on the Moon in high enough concentrations to motivate a search mission. During the Late Heavy Bombardment, the inner planets experienced frequent…

One of the proposed scenarios for the origin of life is the primordial RNA world, which considers that RNA molecules were likely responsible for the storage of genetic information and the catalysis of biochemical reactions in primitive…

Several clues indicate that Titan's atmosphere has been depleted in methane during some period of its history, possibly as recently as 0.5-1 billion years ago. It could also happen in the future. Under these conditions, the atmosphere…

Using a reasonably large chemical reaction network consisting of 421 species, we show that along with normal chemical evolution of molecular cloud during collapse and star formation, significant amount of adenine, a DNA base, may be…

Geological evidence suggests liquid water near the Earth's surface as early as 4.4 billion years ago when the faint young Sun only radiated about 70% of its modern power output. At this point, the Earth should have been a global snowball if…

The Earth's comparatively massive moon, formed via a giant impact on the proto-Earth, has played an important role in the development of life on our planet, both in the history and strength of the ocean tides and in stabilizing the chaotic…

The Hadean, once thought to be uninhabitable and tumultuous, has more recently been recontextualized as a clement time in which oceans, land, and life likely appeared on Earth. This non-exhaustive chapter follows multiple threads from…