Life

Controversial physicist Avi Loeb is on the hunt for aliens again. His new Galileo Project aims to track unexplained oddities in the sky, study interstellar objects, and even examine the "possibility" of alien satellites watching us from orbit.

Something is making methane on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. A new study has found that methane levels detected from the icy moon are far higher than can be explained by known geochemical processes – but they are consistent with microbes.

New modeling of water activity on different solar system planets has found that Venus would be too dry for even the most extreme forms of life – but there may be other contenders in our solar system that we hadn’t considered.

Not all planets orbit stars - some drift freely through the cosmos on their own. These cold, dark worlds don’t make great candidates for hosting life, but a new study suggests that their moons could be more habitable than they might seem.

Jupiter’s Icy moon Europa – which is considered one of the most promising places to find life beyond Earth – may have enough internal heat to trigger volcanic activity on the seafloor of its global ocean, according to the results of a new study.

Tardigrades are some of the toughest known lifeforms, and it’s been proposed they could seed life through asteroid impacts. Now, researchers have tested the hypothesis by firing tardigrades from a gun into sand, and checking how well they survived.

Scientists continue to make surprising discoveries in our own bodies. Stanford researchers have now discovered a new biomolecule hiding in plain sight, which may be common to most types of life and could play a role in autoimmune diseases in humans.

Mars orbiters have spotted a large volcanic deposit that appears to be relatively fresh, only about 53,000 years old. The find may lend weight to the idea that the Red Planet was recently, or still is, habitable for subsurface microbes.

One of the main goals of NASA’s Perseverance rover is to scour the surface of Mars for signs of ancient microbial life. But a new study of the geochemistry of the Red Planet suggests that life could still be thriving below its surface today.

Scientists have predicted the presence and movement of ocean currents in the vast subsurface ocean of Enceladus. The moon, which is sheathed in a 20 km thick shell of ice, is one of the most promising prospects in the search for ET.

How life got started on Earth is one of science's most profound mysteries. Now scientists have found that lightning strikes could have contributed a key ingredient, which suggests it could be easier than we thought to spark life on other planets.

In September 2020, astronomers announced the discovery of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus, a possible sign of life. But a new study has found that a different gas could explain the signature – one that's more common and doesn’t indicate life.