Origin of Life

Extraterrestrial Life

The Origin of Life

• The Murchison meteorite, which fell in Murchison, Victoria, in 1969 provides important clues to the origin of the organic chemicals needed for life.  [More...]
• Observations with the Anglo-Australian Telescope have provided a possible explanation for life's adoption of left-handed rather than right-handed amino acids. [More...]
• New Zealand scientists have proposed a model for a primitive RNA based organism, and reached some surprising conclusions about the branching of the tree of life. [More...]

• Australia has the oldest fossil evidence for life on Earth in the form of 3.5 billion year old stromatolites and microfossils found in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. [More...]
• Australian scientists are using molecular fossils, or biomarkers, to study the early evolutionary history of life. [More...]

• Australian scientists are helping NASA select sites to search for life on Mars. [More...]
• Organisms called "nanobes" found by University of Queensland researchers may resemble the controversial "fossils" found in Martian meteorite ALH 84001. [More...]

• The Anglo-Australian planet search project is finding new planets using the Anglo-Australian Telescope and the doppler technique. [More...]
• The PLANET consortium is an international network of observatories using the method of gravitational lensing to search for extrasolar planets. The collaboration includes astronomers at the Perth Observatory, the University of Tasmania and the University of Canterbury. [More...]
• The idea of an "infrared nulling interferometer" proposed by Australian scientist Ron Bracewell is being developed by NASA and ESA as the TPF and Darwin missions to search for earth-like planets around other stars, and to detect signs of life on them. [More...]
• A UNSW astronomer has estimated that earth-like planets in the Universe will on average be 1.8 billion years older than Earth. [More...]

• The Southern SERENDIP project is using the Parkes radio telescope to search for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. [More...]