For more than a century, popular culture has trained us to picture extraterrestrials as bug-eyed, bipedal “little green men” ...

The search for extraterrestrial life has always been a key motivator of space exploration. But if we were to search Mars, Titan, or the subsurface oceans of Europa or Enceladus, it seems like all we ...

Scientists have discovered 26 previously unknown bacterial species living inside NASA’s ultra-sterile spacecraft assembly ...

Okay, that last bit is a little clunky. But the end of something is never entirely pretty, is it? Phil Torres is a scholar of the end times. He’s also an atheist, an affiliate of the Institute for ...

Aliens may have been closer to Earth than first thought. New research from NASA reveals that Ceres, the dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, harbored the right conditions to ...

Finding life in outer space is one of the great endeavors of humankind. One approach is to find motile microorganisms that can move independently, an ability that is a solid hint for life. If movement ...

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

Protecting planets from extraterrestrial invasion might sound like a job that only exists in science fiction. But NASA recently posted a "Help Wanted" ad for exactly this position, under the name ...

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

High-energy particles zipping through the cosmos are harmful to life on Earth, but scientists think it could be food for potential alien life elsewhere. Saturn's moon Enceladus (shown here in a 2006 ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. An award-winning reporter writing about stargazing and the night sky. Is there life on Venus? A new space mission led by the U.K.