“This discovery changes the way we think about where life might exist,” said Atri. “Instead of looking only for warm planets with sunlight, we can now consider places that are cold and dark, as long as they have some water beneath the surface and are exposed to cosmic rays. Life might be able to survive in more places than we ever imagined.”
The study introduces a new idea called the Radiolytic Habitable Zone. Unlike the traditional “Goldilocks Zone” — the area around a star where a planet could have liquid water on its surface — this new zone focuses on places where water exists underground and can be energized by cosmic radiation. Since cosmic rays are found throughout space, this could mean there are many more places in the universe where life could exist.
The findings provide new guidance for future space missions. Instead of only looking for signs of life on the surface, scientists might also explore underground environments on Mars and the icy moons, using tools that can detect chemical energy created by cosmic radiation.
The first chemical reactions in the wake of the Big Bang have been recreated for the first time in conditions similar to those in the baby Universe.
A team of physicists led by Florian Grussie of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics (MPIK) in Germany has reproduced the reactions of the helium hydride ion (HeH+), a molecule made from a neutral helium atom fusing with an ionized atom of hydrogen.
These are the first steps that lead to the formation of molecular hydrogen (H2), the most abundant molecule in the Universe and the stuff from which stars are born. The new work, therefore, elucidates some of the earliest processes that gave rise to the Universe as we know it today.
Since conventional explanations have failed to pony up dark matter, one physicist is looking towards the unconventional.
In a series of two papers, physicist Stefano Profumo of the University of California, Santa Cruz has proposed two strange, but not impossible, origins for the mystery material responsible for the excess gravitational effects we see out there in the Universe.
In the first, published in May 2025, he proposes that dark matter could have been born in a dark matter ‘mirror’ of our own Universe, where matter is made of dark versions of particles akin to our protons and neutrons.
Who needs sci-fi references when you have a colonoscopy video?