"If a signal gets broadened by its own star's environment, it can slip below our detection thresholds, even if it's there." ...

Life's capacity to survive in simulated lunar and Martian soils has been explored in two papers published in Scientific ...

Ever since physicist Freeman Dyson first proposed the concept in 1960, the "Dyson sphere" has been the holy grail of ...

Explore the dramatic rock formations of Valle de la Luna in the Atacama Desert, Chile—an alien landscape that earned its lunar name.

Looking for molecular evidence of life on other worlds is tricky, but a test based on the reactivity of carbon compounds ...

A potential new mineral on Mars forms when iron sulfates are heated above 100°C. Data from Valles Marineris regions suggest ...

A remarkably hardy bacterium can survive pressures similar to those generated when asteroid impacts blast debris off Mars, a new study has found, suggesting that microbes could endure interplanetary ...

Chalk up another victory for “Conan the Bacterium”—a rugged germ that fresh research suggests could conquer the solar system.

Chalk up another victory for “Conan the Bacterium”—a rugged germ that fresh research suggests could conquer the solar system.

You’ve probably followed the Mars rover missions on and off for years, watching those red-dust landscapes scroll across your TV screen and wondering: Could something have lived there once? Now, after ...

For more than a decade, NASA’s Curiosity rover has been climbing a Martian mountain, reading the planet’s ancient history layer by layer. Now, a discovery of web-like rock for ...

Beyond that, in the decades to come, we might be able to see the colours of an exoplanet’s surface, and determine if plant life might be present there. And then we can search for changes in a planet’s ...