Research partly conducted at the Advanced Photon Source helped scientists discover the composition of Earth’s first atmosphere. What they found raises questions about the origin of life on Earth. A ...

In 1952, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey made sparks fly in a gas-filled flask meant to reflect the composition of Earth's atmosphere around 3.8 billion years ago. Their results suggested that ...

A new University of Colorado at Boulder study indicates Earth in its infancy probably had substantial quantities of hydrogen in its atmosphere, a surprising finding that may alter the way many ...

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When Earth was young, its surface was probably covered in a magma ocean, and the gases rising from that seething sea may have provided it with an atmosphere nearly identical to the toxic one present ...

Organic haze in the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon, Titan, is similar to haze in early Earth’s air — haze that may have helped nourish life on our planet– according to a NASA Astrobiology Institute study ...

Remnants of ancient asteroids revealed Earth was bombarded by massive space rocks more often than previously thought, vastly altering oxygen levels in the planet's early atmosphere. When Earth formed ...

New research published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters suggests that Mars was born wet, with a dense atmosphere allowing warm-to-hot oceans for millions of years. To reach this conclusion, ...

Early Mars may have been a warm version of modern Titan and at least as promising a site for the origin of life as early Earth was, if not more promising. The data constraining the model is the ...