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…
Astrobiologists suspect there could be alien life just out of reach in our solar system, in oceans hidden beneath icy crusts on moons circling Jupiter and Saturn. But unlike the surface of Mars, which can be explored by rovers and landers, these mysterious oceans are currently inaccessible to us. In an effort to…
We’ve all been there: You’re getting some peanut butter, or looking to nosh a nice pickle, when you find your wrist strength is insufficient to get at the jar’s delicious contents.
An encouraging new study has found that the interference from exoplanets—planets that orbit stars outside our solar system—has been overestimated in searches for extraterrestrial signals.
The Webb Space Telescope has made its latest significant discovery: the observation of carbon dioxide coming from a part of Europa, the frozen moon orbiting Jupiter which harbors a salty water ocean under its icy surface.
