Astrobiology News

In a new study published this week in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. David Kipping of Columbia University and Flatiron Institute...

A team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has demonstrated that single-celled microorganisms such as Escherichia coli and...

Giant elliptical galaxies are not as likely as previously thought to be cradles of complex life, according to a paper published in the Monthly Notices...

A team of astrobiologists from the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University has developed a spectral field guide for Earth-like exoplanets transiting...

In a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, University of Tokyo’s Professor Tomonori Totani looked at how the building blocks of life could...

NASA’s Curiosity rover recently discovered various classes of organic matter in the Martian sediments. One intriguing group of detected organic compounds...

Life is pretty easy to recognize. It moves, it grows, it eats, it excretes, it reproduces. Simple. In biology, researchers often use the acronym ‘MRS-GREN’...

Since exoplanets are so far away, astronomers cannot look for signs of extraterrestrial life by visiting these distant worlds. Instead, they must use a...

The existence of habitable alien worlds has been a mainstay of popular culture for more than a century. In the 19th century, astronomers believed that...

A team of researchers at MIT has found that phosphine, which is among the stinkiest, most toxic gases on Earth, cannot be produced in any other way except...

A species of archaea called Metallosphaera sedula is capable of growth on stony meteorites, utilizing metals trapped within these extraterrestrial objects...

Ohio University Emeritus Professor William Romoser has analyzed photos from NASA’s various Mars rovers, mostly from the rover Curiosity, and found insect/arthropod-...

Are we alone in the Universe? It comes down to whether intelligence is a probable outcome of natural selection, or an improbable fluke. By definition,...

In a new study, University of Chicago researcher Stephanie Olson and colleagues modeled climates and ocean habitats of different types of extrasolar planets...

Powerful flares from M-type stars (red dwarfs) — once thought to destroy life on their planets — might help uncover hidden biospheres; their...

BioRock, a new investigation on the International Space Station (ISS), is expected to help gain insight into the physical interactions of liquid, rocks,...

Saturn’s small icy moon Enceladus contains a global subsurface ocean. According to new research from the University of Washington, the ice-covered ocean...

Proxima b, TRAPPIST-1e, Ross-128b and LHS-1140b — the closest potentially habitable exoplanets — orbit a different kind of star than our Sun:...

ALH-77005, a Martian rock found in Antarctica, contains numerous mineralized ‘biosignatures,’ including coccoidal, filamentous structures and organic...