Life in the Solar System Likely Exists and is More

Upda vending computer ted | It’s one of the most compelling questions humanity has tried to answer: Is there life beyond Earth? Scientists are closer than ever to answering that question, thanks to a host of technological advances and each new spacecraft that launches—and sometimes even thanks to evidence falling right onto our laps.

Evidence like two meteorites that crashed into Earth in 1998. Nestled with prestashop 多语商城 in those space rocks were tiny bright blue salt crystals, and inside of those crystals were tiny pockets of extraterrestrial water filled with organic compounds, the building blocks of life, according to new research published on Wednesday.

“I think it’s likely” that there is other life within our solar system, first author on that work, Queenie Chan, a planetary scientist at Open University in the U.K., told Newsweek. And even better, she says, we’re doing the science that might finally find it. “That’s why we like searching missions, isn’t it?”

That means missions like NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, which has been studying the largest object in the asteroid belt, the dwarf planet Ceres. Chan and her co-authors believe the salt crystals they studied may have first been formed on Ceres or a similar object, so they have paid close attention to the results the Dawn spacecraft has gathered. That includes identifying sodium chloride, better known as table salt, and sulfur dioxide. “When I saw them I was like, ‘Hey, I saw that in our sample too,’” she said.