Search for Life

The James Webb Space Telescope has revealed an exoplanet's atmosphere in unprecedented detail, allowing scientists to understand the planet's past and test methods for detecting alien life.

A vent deep under the Arctic ice is surprisingly similar to what may occur on Saturn's icy moon, Enceladus.

Fossils called stromatolites from Western Australia were created by microbes 3.48 billion years ago.

Broccoli, algae and many other plants and microbes on Earth purge toxins by morphing them into gases that might be present in exoplanet atmospheres, signaling life.

An alternative biosignature on alien planets could be the same chemical that makes laughing gas.

A computer simulation of TRAPPIST-1e shows how the James Webb Space Telescope could help the search for habitable alien worlds.

We're unprepared for when E.T. reaches out to us. A team of experts is determined to change that.

The U.S. government has officially started to explain some of the most infamous UFO encounters of the last decade, with China and weather balloons as top offenders.

A recent report about pitch-black "phantom" UFOs in the skies over Ukraine has been discredited by Ukrainian scientists and by Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb.

OWLS, the Ocean Worlds Life Surveyor, would autonomously search for life on the icy moons of the outer solar system.

Experiments have shown how the world's hardiest microbe could endure freezing, dry and irradiated conditions on Mars.

NASA's highly anticipated UFO study is about to begin, and we now know who will conduct it.

Perseverance has socked away 14 drilled-out Mars rock cores to date — two apiece from seven target rocks — and it will likely drop half of them in a "depot" in November or December.

In a new paper, scientists outline how we can look for clues any alien visitors to our solar system may have left behind.

Many white dwarfs host planets that may lie within the habitable zones of those stars and may even support life. Now, scientists have outlined how to hunt for that possible life.

Earth's delicate balance of land and water might be a cosmic rarity, with a new model suggesting that most planets are landlocked desert worlds.

The underground ocean of Saturn's moon Enceladus may contain significant amounts of phosphorus, which is vital for life as we know it.

The knowledge that we're not alone in the universe could have far-reaching effects on our view of ourselves and our place in the universe. But it's tough to get more specific than that.

In 1961, the US astrophysicist Frank Drake, who passed away on Sept. 2 at the age of 92, came up with an equation to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way right now.