More info: www.sciencecafenijmegen.nl/actueel/2025...

Thank you to everyone for coming! A special thanks to AbGradE and @euroastrobiology.bsky.social for joining forces to make this incredible event here in Iceland 🇮🇸 possible! It was a privilege to collaborate, and we truly owe you for making it all happen! Enjoy the conference excursion tomorrow! 🌋🐑🏔️🌊

Find the published cover here: doi.org/10.1002/cplu...
Read more in our press release published on the website of our HIFOL initiative @mpi-astro.bsky.social.
=> mpia.de/en/research/...
Thanks to Mijin Lee, Dmitry Semenov, and Thomas Henning for the great joint effort.

You can also go directly to the open-source chapter here: doi.org/10.5772/inte...

To get a complete but concise overview of (cryo-)volcanism in our solar system, and how this might help to understand its potential on exoplanets, follow the link: klauspaschek.com/publication/...
What are your thoughts? Let me know!

And, most importantly, tidal heating might allow these tiny worlds to stay in this state for long time periods, giving a potential emergence of life plenty of time to arise and thrive. 👽🪸🦑

Our main conclusion in the book chapter is that tidal forces allow even very tiny planets or moons to pass into this state of cryovolcanism. This might expand the number of potentially habitable worlds out there immensely.

Silicate volcanos on the grounds of these extraterrestrial oceans might give rise to hydrothermal vents, a popular site for many theories around the origins of life. 🦠🌋🦠

This often gives rise to a special "cool" type of volcanism, #cryovolcanism, that might produce subsurface liquid water oceans on these ice moons, e.g. #Europa, #Enceladus, or the often underrated and forgotten #Triton, hiding under their hostile-looking ice crusts.

We found in a recent study doi.org/10.3390/app1... that tidal forces might have a bigger potential to heat up moons around the gas giants in our solar system than previously assumed.

Here is again the link to the paper: doi.org/10.3847/1538...
Hope you enjoy reading it!
Hungry for more drama? Read here more about the sugar ribose, another building block of the RNA world, sharing the same “impacting” 😉 story: doi.org/10.3390/life...
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And maybe, one day your grand-...-grandparents crawled out of this soup as living creatures. And after all this, your less-grand-parents 🦕 got hit by a similar stone 🌠 and almost died. Wow, let’s thank cold rocks from space for being alive, and pray they have mercy on us...
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And the nucleobase abundances our model predicts (dashed lines) are agreeing with measurements in real meteorites (yellow bars)! Seems like the early solar system was packed with organics, which fell onto the early Earth, 🌍🌠 contributing to the primordial soup. 🥣
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