When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. A new mission concept that would see a fleet of telescopes probing rocky planets in their stars' ...

Exploring one of science's most exciting frontiers, the book "Life in Space" bridges astrophysics and biology to uncover the ...

Illustration of a hypothetical planet covered in water. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech. April 7, 2025, Mountain View, CA -- What if we spend decades building advanced telescopes to search for life on other ...

Thirty years after the discovery of the first exoplanet, we detected more than 7000 of them in our Galaxy. But there are still billions more to be discovered! At the same time, exoplanetologists have ...

A distant flicker of light from a star can reveal more than you might expect. In fact, a brief, subtle brightening in the sky has helped scientists uncover something astonishing: planets much like ...

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 ...

Chris Impey receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. We have only one example of biology forming in the universe – life on Earth. But what if life ...

Cosmologist Katie Mack breaks down what the latest findings about dark energy mean for our universe’s future. Either way, it won’t be happy. Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collects data ...

What if we spend decades building advanced telescopes to search for life on other planets and come up emptyhanded? A recent study exploring what we can learn about life in the universe -- even if we ...