Extraterrestrial Life

Purple may be a likely color for extraterrestrial organisms, research suggests

Facing budgetary pressure for its Mars Sample Return program, NASA has turned to private industry for ideas—perhaps with one specific company in mind

At a recent workshop, researchers and journalists debated how to announce a potential discovery of extraterrestrial life

At least one in a dozen binary stars shows signs of eating their planets

New analyses cast doubt on claims that a meteor witnessed over the South Pacific in 2014 came from another star system and raise questions about a high-profile expedition to recover the fireball’s fragments from the seafloor

The next year of science for the James Webb Space Telescope has been selected. It includes remote galaxy observations and, at last, a hunt for exomoons

A former government official calls for investigating unidentified anomalous phenomena without succumbing to conspiracy theories about extraterrestrials

The subsurface ocean of Jupiter’s moon Europa may have far less oxygen—and less potential for life—than previously believed, according to data from NASA’s Juno spacecraft

NASA’s enterprising Mars helicopter and its remarkable 72 flights offered a new vision of planetary exploration

A forthcoming investigational report from an office of the Pentagon has found no evidence of aliens, only allegations circulated repeatedly by UFO claim advocates

Molecules in Enceladus’s icy plumes suggest that alien life could exist in our solar system

The genes of microbes living as deep as 1.5 kilometers below the surface reveal a split between minimalist and maximalist lifestyles