This tiny piece of rock will help solve one of the biggest mysteries of the universe.

NASA’s Perseverance rover collected its first Martian sample, which will help scientists determine if there is life beyond Earth.

Astronomers have discovered a strangely shaped spot on the surface of a baby star 450 million light-years away, revealing new insights into how our solar system formed.

The familiar star at the center of our solar system has had billions of years to mature and ultimately provide life-giving energy to us here on Earth. But a very long time ago, our sun was just a growing baby star. What did the sun look like when it was so young? That’s long been a mystery that, if solved, could teach us about the formation of our solar system—so-named because sol is the Latin word for sun—and other stellar systems made up of planets and cosmic objects orbiting stars.

“We’ve detected thousands of planets in other stellar systems in our galaxy, but where did all of these planets come from? Where did Earth come from? That’s what really drives me,” says Catherine Espaillat, lead author on the paper and a Boston University College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of astronomy.

But astronomer Tiger Hsiao of National Tsing Hua University says we might be looking for the wrong thing. In a new study, he and colleagues set out to calculate whether it would also be possible to use a Dyson sphere around a black hole. They analyzed black holes of three different sizes: those five, 20 and 4 million times the mass of our Sun. These, respectively, reflect the lower and upper limits of black holes known to have formed from the collapse of massive stars—and the even more enormous mass of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive massive black hole thought to lurk at the center of the Milky Way.

Black holes are typically thought of as consumers rather than producers of energy. Yet their huge gravitational fields can generate power through several theoretical processes. These include the radiation emitted from the accumulation of gas around the hole, the spinning “accretion” disk of matter slowly falling toward the event horizon, the relativistic jets of matter and energy that shoot out along the hole’s axis of rotation, and Hawking radiation—a theoretical way that black holes can lose mass, releasing energy in the process.

From their calculations, Hsiao and colleagues concluded that the accretion disk, surrounding gas, and jets of black holes can all serve as viable energy sources. In fact, the energy from the accretion disk alone of a stellar black hole of 20 solar masses could provide the same amount of power as Dyson spheres around 100,000 stars, the team will report next month in the. Were a supermassive black hole harnessed, the energy it could provide might be 1 million times larger still.

New definitions of “habitable worlds” could include planets with global oceans under a steamy hydrogen atmosphere or exclude ones that started out habitable but lost all their water.

The hunt for habitable worlds owes a debt to this moment in planetary science history.

It’s the 40th anniversary of the Voyager 2 flyby of Saturn, which has informed every NASA mission to the ringed gas giant since.

The James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled for launch on October 31. It will help scientists hunt for alien life on exoplanets and look to the beginning of time.

Some highly speculative ideas how life may spread in the galaxy, for more info see.

There is even more to the astrobiological potential of rogue planets, however. Not only could they hold microbial life bottled up in their subsurface, they may be able to distribute life throughout the galaxy. In our paper we suggest two ways that this kind of panspermia might occur.

If a wandering planet passes close to a habitable rocky planet within a solar system, the outer layer of the rogue planet might be torn apart by gravitational disturbances, and the resulting debris could end up on the habitable world. Dormant life that had been trapped in the icy shell of the rogue planet may become active again and establish a biosphere on the receiving planet.

Alternatively, the two planets could collide, or come close to colliding. This is generally believed to have a sterilizing effect, as when a Mars-sized object (probably a rogue planet!) collided with the early Earth, resulting in the creation of our Moon. But the distribution of energy and matter during such an event would be very uneven, and some localities might not experience temperatures high enough for sterilization. A common atmosphere may even form, which I think was the case for early Earth and Moon shortly after the cataclysmic impact. Some (dormant) microbial life may survive suspended in such an atmosphere for a long time, before eventually settling down when the surface has cooled off and become more habitable again.