News

Astronomers use ‘little hurricanes’ to weigh and date planets around young stars

9 January 2023

Little ‘hurricanes’ that form in the discs of gas and dust around young stars can be used to study certain aspects of planet formation, even for smaller planets which orbit their star at large distances and are out of reach for most telescopes. Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Institute for Advanced...

Learning about the first animals on Earth from life at the poles

12 October 2022

The amazing survival strategies of polar marine creatures might help to explain how the first animals on Earth could have evolved earlier than the oldest fossils suggest according to new research published in Global Change Biology . These first, simple and now extinct, animals might have lived through some of the most...

Seawater could have provided phosphorous required for emerging life

22 September 2022

The problem of how phosphorus became a universal ingredient for life on Earth may have been solved by a group of Cambridge scientists, who have recreated primordial seawater containing the element in the lab. Their results, published in the journal Nature Communications , show that seawater might be the missing source of...

Launch of he Leverhulme Centre for Life in the Universe

8 August 2022

The Leverhulme Centre for Life in the Universe (LCLU) was officially launched on 27 June 2022 at Clare College, Cambridge. The Centre seeks to harness simultaneous breakthroughs in astrophysics, planetology, organic chemistry, biology and cognate disciplines to develop a deeper understanding of life, its emergence, and its...

No signs (yet) of life on Venus

15 June 2022

The unusual behaviour of sulphur in Venus’ atmosphere cannot be explained by an ‘aerial’ form of extra-terrestrial life, according to a new study. Researchers from the University of Cambridge used a combination of biochemistry and atmospheric chemistry to test the ‘life in the clouds’ hypothesis, which astronomers have...

First animals developed complex ecosystems before the Cambrian explosion

19 May 2022

Early animals formed complex ecological communities more than 550 million years ago, setting the evolutionary stage for the Cambrian explosion, according to a study by Rebecca Eden, an undergraduate student who worked on this as part of her final year project in the Department of Zoology, Emily Mitchell , and Andrea Manica...

IPLU funds interdisciplinary projects in planetary science and life in the universe

11 May 2022

Last year, the Cambridge Initiative for Planetary Science and Life in the Universe (IPLU) opened the first round of the Cambridge Planetary Science and Life in the Universe Research Grants Scheme . The purpose of the scheme is to enable researchers within the School of Physical Sciences of the University of Cambridge and...

Cambridge astronomer awarded ERC Consolidator Grant to investigate exoplanetary atmospheres in the sub-Neptune regime

24 March 2022

Nikku Madhusudhan , Professor of Astrophysics and Exoplanetary Science at the Institute of Astronomy, is one of five researchers at the University of Cambridge who have won consolidator grants this year from the European Research Council (ERC), Europe’s premiere funding organisation for frontier research. Prof. Madhusudhan...

New way of dating asteroid collisions advances our knowledge of early Solar System history

24 February 2022

Geologists have identified a new way of tracing collisions between asteroids, using microscopic mineral textures, which could greatly enhance our understanding of how planets and asteroids interacted across much of Solar System history. Planetary histories are shaped, and perhaps recorded, by collisions. For example, the...

IPLU Science Day Lent 2022

16 February 2022

The IPLU Science Day was held on 7 February 2022 to bring together researchers from across the University to discuss their work on planetary science and life in the Universe. We were also joined by our guest speaker, Matteo Brogi from the University of Warwick who spoke about his work on exoplanet atmospheres. Below is a...

Astronomers use ‘little hurricanes’ to weigh and date planets around young stars

Learning about the first animals on Earth from life at the poles

Seawater could have provided phosphorous required for emerging life

Launch of he Leverhulme Centre for Life in the Universe

No signs (yet) of life on Venus

First animals developed complex ecosystems before the Cambrian explosion

IPLU funds interdisciplinary projects in planetary science and life in the universe

Cambridge astronomer awarded ERC Consolidator Grant to investigate exoplanetary atmospheres in the sub-Neptune regime

New way of dating asteroid collisions advances our knowledge of early Solar System history

IPLU Science Day Lent 2022

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