Bruce Dorminey

artist's interpretation of the red planet getty Microbes are clever little buggers —- for decades, they've been used by the mining

Full view of Mars NASA The hunt for past life on Mars has been an astrobiological obsession of the last three decades.

Artist's interpretation of Titan's hydrocarbon lakes near its north pole. Saturn is pictured in the ... [+] upper right of the illustration.

The author in the dome of the 1.65 meter telescope at Lithuania's Moletai Astronomical Observatory. Bruce Dorminey

An artist's concept of early earth as a pale orange dot some 4 billion years ago. NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Francis Reddy

A trail after a meteorite exploded in the sky over Chelyabinsk, Russian Federation February 15, 2013 getty

MOUNT SHARP, MARS - JANUARY 2015: In this handout provided by NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS This ... [+] self-portrait of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows

Sixteenth century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe laid the framework for modern cosmology without ever using a telescope.

Finding evidence for the first life ever to emerge on planet earth is a long, tough slog. But oddly enough, real answers may ultimately come from Mars.

Long underappreciated, magnetism itself may have given our solar system the architecture needed for habitability. A team at the University of Oxford is investigating how.