Is intelligent alien life really out there? With powerful telescopes identifying more potentially habitable planets each year ...

Exoplanets like Earth have been discovered but not all Earth-like planets are equal when it comes to alien life. An astronomer explains.

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 ...

It's not nearly as easy as one might think. The post If Scientists Ever Find Strong Evidence of Alien Life, Communicating It ...

Life on Earth may exist thanks to an incredible stroke of luck — a chemical sweet spot that most planets miss during their formation but ours managed to hit.

Scientists may need to broaden their horizons in their search for alien life.

A new study suggests a novel approach in the long-running scientific endeavor to find intelligent life beyond Earth. Instead of casting a wide, speculative net across the cosmos, researchers from Penn ...

A new paper suggests that BARSOOM may have been alive on the planet, and was killed in the Viking experiments.

There might be many more planets that could be home to aliens than we thought, according to a new study. For years, scientists have searched for life in the “habitable” or “goldilocks” zone – where it ...

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 ...

New research from ETH Zurich challenges the long-held “follow the water” rule in the search for extraterrestrial life. Scientists argue that a planet’s habitability depends on a narrow chemical ...

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 ...