Marc Hirschmann News Today

Tracing path of carbon, scientists rewrite picture of early planet formation When people think about the most important ingredient for life on other planets, they usually talk about water. But there’s another element that makes our existence possible.  “We’re carbon-based life forms,” said University of Chicago geophysical scientist Fred Ciesla, “and carbon is an important part of keeping a mild climate.”  It can also be used as forensic tool to piece together ...

Tracing path of carbon, scientists rewrite picture of early planet formation When people think about the most important ingredient for life on other planets, they usually talk about water. But there’s another element that makes our existence possible.  “We’re carbon-based life forms,” said University of Chicago geophysical scientist Fred Ciesla, “and carbon is an important part of keeping a mild climate.”  It can also be used as forensic tool to piece together ...

From stardust to pale blue dot: Carbon’s interstellar journey to Earth We are made of stardust, the saying goes, and a pair of studies including University of Michigan research finds that may be more true than we previously thought. The first study, led by U-M researcher Jie (Jackie) Li and published in Science Advances, finds that most of the carbon on Earth was likely delivered from the interstellar medium, the material that exists in space between stars in a galaxy. This likely happened we...

Carbon is the crucial element for life as we know it, so understanding where it came from matters a lot if we hope to understand life in the universe. New research claims that the carbon that makes us came later in the formation of Earth. The idea and supporting evidence are reported in two studies, the first one published in Science Advances. The Sun formed from a large cloud of gas and dust. In its early days, our star influenced this material to flatten out into a disk, from which eventually...