When we consider the origins of life in our Solar System, a remarkable discovery has to be taken into account –the Solar System is substantially over-abundant in metals compared with average interstellar abundances at the time of its formation 4.6 billion years ago. These solar abundances are similar to present interstellar abundances, an anomaly that remains a mystery. One possibility scientists suggest is that the Sun formed much closer to the galactic center than its current position, which may have resulted in a plentiful supply of raw materials in the solar nebula from which to form the Earth and its biosphere.
“They are stained glass windows to the earliest time period of the solar system,” says Harold Connolly, a cosmochemist with Rowan University in New Jersey, about the enigmatic origins of ancient chondrules delivered to Earth by Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission. “They are witnesses to processes that operated in the early solar system. The question is, what did they witness?”
“Something is the cause of the fact that there aren’t a huge amount of UFOs out there,” says Uffe Gråe Jørgensen, head of Astrophysics & Planetary Science group at the Niels Bohr Institute, about the huge difference between being one of the 10 billion Earth-like planets in the habitable zone, and being habitable or having developed a technological civilization.
“Early Mars was an extremely active planet from a geological point of view,” said Alberto G. Fairén, a visiting astrobiologist at Cornell University. “The planet had the conditions needed to support the presence of liquid water on the surface – and on Earth, where there’s water, there’s life. “So early Mars was a habitable planet,” he said. “Was it inhabited? That’s a question that the next rover Perseverance will help to answer.”
“Historically, our assumption has been that the region around Jupiter is fairly empty, cleaned out by the giant planet’s gravity, but our results teach us that there is a region that is constantly being fed,” said Kathryn Volk at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in 2019 about a constant source of new objects that may help explain the surprising rate of icy body impacts with Jupiter, such as the Shoemaker-Levy 9 event in 1994 when over twenty fragments of comet that collided with Jupiter were observed by astronomers at hundreds of observatories around the world.
