Recent reports about the detection of carbon-based organic molecules on Mars by the instruments of the Perseverance rover included suggestions that some of the organics may well have fallen from space over the eons, and were then preserved on the Martian surface. Given the cruciality of organics as building blocks of life --or even as …
Three Star Ballet, With Exoplanet
It hardly seems possible, but researchers have detected a planet in apparently stable orbit within a three star system -- a configuration now known as a trinary. The ubiquity of binary stars has been understood for some time, and the presence of exoplanets orbiting around and within them is no longer a surprise. But this …
Cloudy, With a Chance of Iron Rain
From an Earth-centric point of view, rain of course means falling water. We can have storms with falling dust -- I experienced a few of those while a reporter in India -- but rain is pretty much exclusively H2O falling from the clouds. But as the study of exoplanets moves aggressively into the realm …