From Viking to Perseverance, scientists have spent decades chasing chemical hints that could point to life beyond Earth.

From mudstones on Mars to strange gases in exoplanet atmospheres, tentative evidence for extraterrestrial life is starting to ...

Forget the grainy footage of 'flying saucers' or the campy sci-fi tropes of little green men from Mars; the search for ...

Across astronomy and astrobiology, a quiet but profound shift is underway. Instead of assuming the galaxy teems with ...

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 ...

Historically, many scientists and society have been fascinated by the prospect of making contact with extraterrestrial ...

In the many decades of NASA exploration, there has only been one detection that got on that scale. It was collected by the ...

Science fiction writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke once said, “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” And perhaps that fear is what ...

Within the next 20 years, human beings could discover life on other planets. It was this startling prediction—and the subsequent realization that kids sitting in elementary school classrooms today ...

Conspiracy theories have raged about 3I/ATLAS being an unnatural object. But the alien question, while fun, generates misinformation and distracts from the science. When you purchase through links on ...

NASA's alien-hunting Europa Clipper spacecraft took seven hours of ultraviolet observations of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS while both objects zoom toward Jupiter. When you purchase through links on ...

From the physical world to the biological universe: Democritus to Lowell -- Plurality of worlds and the decline of anthropocentrism -- Life in the solar system: the limits of observation -- Planetary ...