This week at the Gizmodo science desk, deputy editor George Dvorsky reported on a modification to the famous Drake Equation that produces a rather sobering result about the number of extraterrestrial intelligences in our Galaxy. Health reporter Ed Cara chronicles a mysterious disease from the 1500s that vanished from…
Astronomer Frank Drake formulated his influential equation in 1961 to estimate the number of civilizations in the Milky Way capable of communicating with us. Our understanding of planetary science has changed a lot since then, leading a team of scientists to propose a pair of important adjustments that produce an…
Jostling on the fault lines of Enceladus’ frozen crust may be responsible for the plumes of icy material spewing from the moon’s watery underbelly, according to a team of researchers that recently modeled the motion.
The Atacama Desert—an arid, unpopulated swath of northern Chile that is home to some of the most perceptive ground telescopes on Earth—is actually teeming with life beneath the ground, according to a team of researchers that recently scrutinized its soils.
Unlike its predecessor Curiosity, NASA’s Perseverance rover is explicitly intended to “search for potential evidence of past life,” according to the official mission objectives.
By now, I’m assuming that we’ve made our way through all eight episodes of the Netflix adaptation of Liu Cixin’s The 3 Body Problem (and by we, I mean sci-fi nerds). The series is packed with science—much of it way over the top—but it grounds itself in quantum mechanics and astrophysics.
Speculation about extraterrestrials is not all that new. There was a vibrant debate in 17th-century Europe about the existence of life on other planets.
In a little more than 30 years, we went from knowing only of the planets in our star system to discovering over 5,000 distant worlds spread across the cosmos. So far, none have looked quite like Earth. If an Earth-like planet was orbiting another star, however, it may look different than our precious pale blue dot. In…
Icy moons like Europa and Enceladus are exciting venues for the prospect of life beyond Earth, because they are thought to contain oceans of water beneath their frigid surfaces.
A recent SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) effort focused on a famous supernova from 1987, working under the premise that aliens might use such events to draw attention to themselves with synchronized beacons. Although this hunt came up short, it lays the groundwork for future searches using the same…
