oxygen

There’s a joke that asks, “Where do astronauts go for a drink?” The answer is, “The space bar!” But in the distant future, you might ask that question literally. There really is alcohol in space, even if we can’t access it yet.

Pretty much everyone knows that oxygen is a fundamental requirement for life as we know it, but oddly enough that’s not entirely right. There are many simple life forms, such as some kinds of bacteria and archea, that don’t have a major metabolic pathway that needs oxygen.

In 2020 an international team of astonomers made a surprising discovery using the James Clerk Maxwell telescope in Hawai'i. They found evidence that the atmosphere of the planet Venus contains tiny amounts of phsophine gas.

In 2020, a team of American scientists reported the first remotely sensed evidence of the mineral hematite on Earth's moon. The researchers made their discovery with a NASA instrument aboard the Indian space agency's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft orbiting the moon.

Many astronomers think that exoplanets circling distant stars might be waterworlds, but maybe we don't need to look that far away. In 2020 two American geologists published evidence that Earth's surface may have been entirely covered with water up until at least 3.2 billion years ago.

The Northern Lights, also known as the Aurora Borealis, are waving ribbons of green, red and purple in the sky. These curtains of light can be seen as far south as the South Pole. In the southern hemisphere, however, they're called the Aurora Australis. They can also sometimes be seen in New Zealand or Chile.

Today on A Moment of Science were going to explain why Earth's air contains oxygen.