A team of researchers has just demonstrated that essential molecular chains, peptides, can form spontaneously on cosmic dust grains, meaning in space. This result changes our understanding of ...

The chemical foundations of life could be found in the frigid pockets of molecular clouds that exist in the space between stars, rather than on any planetary bodies. At the University of Aarhus in ...

Recreating cosmic dust may help answer questions about how meteorites hitting Earth came to contain the organic matter that they do ...

Scientists have shown that the building blocks of proteins can form naturally in deep space. This means the raw ingredients for life may exist long before planets are formed.

The study of astrochemistry delves into the formation, evolution and destruction of molecules across the vast expanses of the interstellar medium (ISM). Within these regions—from cold dark molecular ...

An instrument built by the University of Colorado Boulder will soon launch on a NASA space mission where it will aim to collect interstellar dust particles hurtling through space at an average of 16 ...

NASA’s newly launched IMAP mission is set to tell us more about the boundary between our Solar System and interstellar space ...

Saturn's moon Enceladus is a frozen world, but it isn't frozen solid. Colossal cryovolcanoes near the ice-locked moon's south pole send plumes from its briny global ocean so far into space that they ...