An asteroid struck Mars 11 million years ago and sent pieces of the red planet hurtling through space. One of these chunks of Mars eventually crashed into the Earth somewhere near Purdue and is one of the few meteorites that can be traced directly to Mars. This meteorite was rediscovered in a drawer at Purdue University in 1931 and therefore named the Lafayette Meteorite. 

During early investigations of the Lafayette Meteorite, scientists discovered that it had interacted with liquid water while on Mars. Scientists have long wondered when that interaction with liquid water took place.  An international collaboration of scientists including two from Purdue University’s College of Science have recently determined the age of the minerals in the Lafayette Meteorite that formed when there was liquid water.  The team has published its findings in Geochemical Perspective Letters.

An international team led by the University of Geneva (UNIGE) has identified three ultra-massive galaxies – nearly as massive as the Milky Way – already in place within the first billion years after the Big Bang. This surprising discovery was made possible by the James Webb Space Telescope's FRESCO program, which uses the NIRCam/grism spectrograph to measure accurate distances and stellar masses of galaxies. The results indicate that the formation of stars in the early Universe was far more efficient than previously thought, challenging existing galaxy formation models. The study is published in Nature.

An international team that includes the University of Bath in the UK has discovered three ultra-massive galaxies (‘Red Monsters’) in the early Universe forming at unexpected speeds, challenging current models of galaxy formation.

Scientists using observations from NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory have discovered, for the first time, the signal from a pair of monster black holes disrupting a cloud of gas in the center of a galaxy.

The chances of intelligent life emerging in our Universe – and in any hypothetical ones beyond it – can be estimated by a new theoretical model which has echoes of the famous Drake Equation. This was the formula that American astronomer Dr Frank Drake came up with in the 1960s to calculate the number of detectable extraterrestrial civilisations in our Milky Way galaxy. More than 60 years on, astrophysicists led by Durham University have produced a different model which instead focuses on the conditions created by the acceleration of the Universe's expansion and the amount of stars formed.