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 ...

Scientists might have just found Earth's icy, distant cousin a few hundred million light-years away. HD 137010 b is one of ...

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

Alien life could exist on hot, rocky planets, sustained not by water but by a type of salty fluid, new research suggests. Reading time 3 minutes The search for alien life usually hinges on finding the ...

A new study challenges the traditional boundaries of the habitable zone, showing that liquid water could exist on the dark ...

We’re celebrating 180 years of Scientific American. Explore our legacy of discovery and look ahead to the future. In the late 1800s Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli pointed a telescope at Mars ...

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) focuses on finding technosignatures—potential signs of alien technology. If we look carefully, we might have a chance at detecting their ...

The search for alien life often sparks the imagination with images of extraterrestrial beings and strange worlds. However, a new theory is shifting the focus—what if life elsewhere in the universe ...

High-energy particles zipping through the cosmos are harmful to life on Earth, but scientists think it could be food for potential alien life elsewhere. Saturn's moon Enceladus (shown here in a 2006 ...