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...
Using data from the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) instrument aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, researchers have...
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,...
The Venusian climate remained stable and temperate for about three billion years, until a mysterious global event resurfaced around 80% of the planet,...
In a new study, University of Chicago researcher Stephanie Olson and colleagues modeled climates and ocean habitats of different types of extrasolar planets...
Astronomers from the Breakthrough Listen, a scientific program in search for signs of intelligent life in the Universe, and the VERITAS (Very Energetic...
NASA announced last week that it had selected the Dragonfly mission to explore the prebiotic organic chemistry and look for signs of life on Titan, the...
Saturn’s small icy moon Enceladus contains a global subsurface ocean. According to new research from the University of Washington, the ice-covered ocean...
The Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) tunable laser spectrometer onboard Curiosity last week detected surprisingly high levels of the gas methane at Gale Crater:...
ALH-77005, a Martian rock found in Antarctica, contains numerous mineralized ‘biosignatures,’ including coccoidal, filamentous structures and organic...
The discovery of life on Mars would get pretty much everyone excited. But the scientists hunting for it would probably be happy no matter what the outcome...
K-type dwarf stars are dimmer than the Sun but brighter than the faintest stars. These stars live a very long time — 17 billion to 70 billion years,...
A liquid ocean in contact with a silicate interior makes Jupiter’s icy moon Europa a prime location for life. This possibility is compounded if geologic...
