7 articles
Biosignatures look for the chemical exhaust of living things in far-off atmospheres. Technosignatures listen for radio hums and laser pulses from technology. They are the two roads to alien life - and each has its own way of fooling us.
Using a telescope in Chile, scientists detected helium escaping from LHS 1140 b - a super-Earth sitting exactly where liquid water could exist on a rocky surface. It is the first rocky habitable-zone world confirmed to hold any atmosphere at all.
The Milky Way has 200 billion stars and has existed for 13 billion years. Yet no confirmed signal, no artifact, no visitor has reached us. Scientists call this gap the Fermi Paradox - and its most alarming solution should concern everyone.
A new arXiv preprint by Breakthrough Listen researcher Brian Lacki argues that Moon dust could harbor microscopic relics of extinct extraterrestrial megastructures scattered across the galaxy over billions of years.
New impact simulations from ETH Zürich find that a single early-solar-system collision with a moon-sized body can simultaneously account for Venus' anomalous retrograde rotation and its absence of any natural satellite.
A research team has identified erythrulose, a four-carbon sugar, in a molecular cloud near the Galactic Centre - marking the first sugar confirmed in the interstellar medium and tracing a chemical path toward the building blocks of life.
Using its Mid-Infrared Instrument, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope identified methane and anomalously high carbon dioxide on comet 3I/ATLAS - a visitor from another star system - the first chemical fingerprint ever obtained from interstellar material.
