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Primordial (or Pop III) supernovae were the first nucleosynthetic engines in the Universe, forging the heavy elements required for the later formation of planets and life. Water, in particular, is thought to be crucial to the cosmic origins…
Two heavy elements essential to human biology are thought to have been produced by the astrophysical $r$-process, which occurs in neutron-rich environments: iodine is a constituent of thyroid hormones that affect many physiological…
The early Solar System contained short-lived radionuclides such as 60Fe (t1/2 = 1.5 Myr) whose most likely source was a nearby supernova. Previous models of Solar System formation considered a supernova shock that triggered the collapse of…
The Moon holds important clues to the early evolution of the Solar System. Some 50 impact basins (crater diameter D>300 km) have been recognized on the lunar surface, implying that the early impact flux was much higher than it is now. The…
The problem of the formation of the Moon is still not explained satisfactorily. While it is a generally accepted scenario that the last giant impact on Earth between some 50 to 100 million years after the starting of the formation of the…
Certain subterranean environments of Earth have naturally accumulated long-lived radionuclides, such as 238U, 232Th and 40K, near the presence of liquid water. In these natural radioactive environments (NRE), water radiolysis can produce…
Material from the surface of a planet can be ejected into space by a large impact, and could carry primitive life forms with it. We performed n-body simulations of such ejecta to determine where in the Solar System rock from Earth and Mars…
We analyze the evolution of the potentially habitable planet Proxima Centauri b to identify environmental factors that affect its long-term habitability. We consider physical processes acting on size scales ranging from the galactic to the…
One longstanding mystery in bio-evolution since Darwin's time is the origin of the Cambrian explosion that happened around 540 million years ago (Mya), where an extremely rapid increase of species occurred. Here we suggest that a nearby GRB…
We create the first quantitative model for the early lunar atmosphere, coupled with a magma ocean crystallization model. Immediately after formation, the moon's surface was subject to a radiative environment that included contributions from…
The driving force behind the origin and evolution of life has been the thermodynamic imperative of increasing the entropy production of the biosphere through increasing the global solar photon dissipation rate. In the upper atmosphere of…
There are two dominant and contrasting classes of origin of life scenarios: those predicting that life emerged in submarine hydrothermal systems, where chemical disequilibrium can provide an energy source for nascent life; and those…
Since the Archean, N2 has been a major atmospheric constituent in Earth's atmosphere. Nitrogen is an essential element in the building blocks of life, therefore the geobiological nitrogen cycle is a fundamental factor in the long term…
Based on early solar system abundances of short-lived radionuclides (SRs), such as $^{26}$Al (T$_{1/2} = 0.74$ Myr) and $^{60}$Fe (T$_{1/2} = 1.5$ Myr), it is often asserted that the Sun was born in a large stellar cluster, where a massive…
Immediately after their formation, the terrestrial planets experienced intense impact bombardment by comets, leftover planetesimals from primary accretion, and asteroids. This temporal interval in solar system evolution, termed late…
The abundance and biological role of potassium suggest that its unstable nuclide was present in all stages of terrestrial biogenesis. With its enhanced isotopic ratio in the Archean eon, $^{40}$K may have contributed to the special, perhaps…
Here we critically examine the geophysical and geochemical properties of the Moon in order to identify the extent to which dynamical scenarios satisfy these observations. New joint inversions of existing lunar geophysical data (mean mass,…
It is sometimes asserted that the rapidity of biogenesis on Earth suggests that life is common in the Universe. We critically examine the assumptions inherent in this argument. Using a lottery model for biogenesis in the Universe, we…
Hydrogravitional-dynamics (HGD) cosmology of Gibson/Schild 1996 predicts that the primordial H-He^4 gas of big bang nucleosynthesis became proto-globular-star-cluster clumps of Earth-mass planets at 300 Kyr. The first stars formed from…
Life can be viewed as a localized chemical system that sits on, or in the basin of attraction of, a metastable dynamical attractor state that remains out of equilibrium with the environment. Such a view of life allows that new living states…