By resurrecting a 3.2-billion-year-old enzyme and studying it inside living microbes, researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have created a new way to improve our understanding of the origins of life on Earth and possibly recognize signs of life elsewhere.

Astronomers have long searched for life within a rather narrow ring around a star, the “habitable zone,” where a planet should be neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water. A new study argues that this ring is too strict: on tidally locked worlds that keep one face in daylight and the other in permanent night, heat may still circulate enough for liquid water to persist on the dark side, even when the planet orbits closer to cool M- and K-dwarf stars than conservative climate models allow. The study also points outward: liquid water could exist far beyond the classical outer edge, hidden beneath ice as subglacial or intraglacial lakes, meaning the number of worlds worth checking for water, and potentially life-friendly conditions, may be much larger than the traditional map suggests.

An international research team has discovered a supermassive black hole growing rapidly while radiating bright X-rays and radio waves. This combination of features contradicts the current models of black hole growth, requiring astronomers to look for a new explanation.

Researchers have reported new experimental results addressing the origin of rare proton-rich isotopes heavier than iron, called p-nuclei. Led by Artemis Tsantiri, then-graduate student at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) and current postdoctoral fellow at the University of Regina in Canada, the study presents the first rare isotope beam measurement of proton capture on arsenic-73 to produce selenium-74, providing new constraints on how the lightest p-nucleus is formed and destroyed in the cosmos. The team published its results in Physical Review Letters (“Constraining the Synthesis of the Lightest 𝑝 Nucleus ⁷⁴Se”).