The asteroid Bennu has provided groundbreaking insights into the chemistry that may have set the stage for life in the early ...

Astrophysicists have been grappling with the question of how water arrived on our young planet for decades. One of the ...

Scientists recently discovered that San Bernardino County's Searles Lake contains minerals found in outer space.

Searles Lake has long been shaped by shifting water levels, volcanic minerals, and evaporite formation. In 2024, satellites ...

Scientists have discovered the essential building blocks to life on a sample from a distant asteroid. The sample ... making them resemble those left in the crusts of dried lake beds on Earth — except ...

Is Earth really exceptional?  A new book seems to reaffirm that notion.  But given the right conditions, primitive life may be a mere byproduct of biophysics.

SALT LAKE CITY — After examining just 0.06% of a 120-gram material sample from the surface of asteroid Bennu — which ... said. His team made what it called "Bennu tea" for their experiments.

Researchers have made exciting ... salt lakes. The scientists have found a total of eleven minerals that probably originate from a brine-like environment on Bennu's parent asteroid.

The instruments on the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made observations of reflected ... That same evaporation process also formed the ancient lake beds we’ve seen these minerals in on Earth. Bennu’s parent ...

Asteroid Bennu is thought to be made of rubble fragments from a 4.5-billion ... brines – a bit like salt deposits forming in the salt lakes that we have in Australia and around the world.