5 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.
When a planet crosses its star, a sliver of light filters through its atmosphere and certain colors vanish - the fingerprints of its gases. That faint signal is how the search for life beyond Earth actually works, and why a promising result is never proof.
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.
A new arXiv paper and Keck Institute study argue that the five-spacecraft LIFE mission has cleared its core engineering hurdles - raising the first plausible technical pathway to directly sampling the atmospheres of Earth-like exoplanets for chemical signs of life.
The International Academy of Astronautics has ratified revised guidelines for verifying and disclosing a potential signal from extraterrestrial intelligence - the first major overhaul since 2010.
