water

Well that was pun.

The Milky Way is teeming with billions of planets, including many that are similar to our own. But how many of these alien worlds have water, and do any host extraterrestrial life?

No answers to those questions just yet. But astronomers using a new infrared technique say they've discovered water vapor in the atmosphere of a nearby gas giant planet called "tau Boötis b."

The finding suggests that the technique may play an important role in identifying which exoplanets might be hospitable for life.

What's significant about the latest find is that the rocks are the "first ever" discovered on the Red Planet to contain streambed gravels. The rocks were found by Curiosity last fall. Examining them over time, researchers actually were able to determine how deep and fast the water flowed at that location. "At a minimum, the stream was flowing at a speed equivalent to a walking pace -- a meter, or three feet, per second -- and it was ankle-deep to hip-deep," Rebecca Williams of the P

The water that supports life on Earth may have been on the planet much earlier than scientists previously thought, new research suggests.

While the environmental conditions in Earth's early years made it impossible for water to remain on the planet's surface, scientists have found evidence that the ingredients for water were protectively stored inside rocky bodies near our planet — and maybe inside Earth itself. The new findings suggest that there was water in the inner solar system 135 million years earlier than previous evidence had shown.

The presence of water on Mars is often talked about in the past tense -- as in, billions of years in the past. But researchers have found clues that water could be flowing in the present, at least during warm seasons.

Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology are looking at dark features on Martian slopes that are finger-shaped. They appear and disappear seasonally.

These flows represent the best suggestion we know of that Mars has water right now, scientists say. The study is published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Via Ian O'Neill

According to MSL scientists based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., the ball isn't as big as it looks — it's approximately one centimeter wide. Their explanation is that it is most likely something known as a "concretion." Other examples of concretions have been found on the Martian surface before — take, for example, the tiny haematite concretions, or "blueberries", observed by Mars rover Opportunity in 2004 — and they were created during sedimentary rock formation when Mars was abundant in liquid water many millions of years ago.