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Astrobiology news
How NASA plans to build the Habitable Worlds Observatory
We've been covering the journey of the Habitable Worlds Observatory for some time now. Over the past few years, it's gone from a proposal to a relatively fleshed-out plan for how and what the next Great Observatory should ...
Astronomy
Jul 27, 2026
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Why Europa's hidden ocean may be more difficult to reach than scientists thought
Europa, one of Jupiter's icy moons, has long fascinated scientists because of what may lie beneath its frozen shell: a global ocean of liquid water. That hidden ocean has made Europa one of the most compelling places in the ...
Astrobiology
Jul 24, 2026
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UK in pole position to lead key instrument in NASA's hunt for Earth-like worlds
UK astronomers are a step closer to playing a leading role in NASA's search for alien life in the coming decades as they continue developing one of the core instruments of the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO). The exciting ...
Astrobiology
Jul 24, 2026
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Could alien signals be hiding on a different radio channel?
Astronomers searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence may have been missing alien signals in part of the radio spectrum that has not recently been explored.
Astronomy
Jul 23, 2026
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Finding Venus zone planets with PLATO will show us how habitable planets evolve
Dreams of finding a sort of Earth 2.0 motivate much of the thinking around the search for exoplanets. But there is more to exoplanet science than searching for potentially habitable worlds. Scientists need a deeper understanding ...
Astrobiology
Jul 21, 2026
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Researchers advance tech that could help scientists detect habitable worlds beyond our solar system
Are we alone in the universe? For scientists working on NASA's proposed Habitable Worlds Observatory, that question is no longer purely philosophical. It is increasingly becoming an engineering problem.
Astrobiology
Jul 20, 2026
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How the sun goes to 'sleep' could reveal future space weather when it wakes
Scientists have developed a new way to predict the strength of the sun's next activity cycle up to seven years before it reaches its peak.
Astrobiology
Jul 19, 2026
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Nearby rocky planet may be replenishing helium from atmosphere, study finds
Nearly a decade after the discovery of LHS 1140b, a rocky exoplanet in the habitable zone of a nearby low-mass star, a new study reveals that the object may have its own atmosphere.
Astrobiology
Jul 16, 2026
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In search of life beyond our solar system: Atmosphere detected on a habitable-zone rocky world
In a major milestone in the search for life on other planets, astronomers have detected, for the first time, an atmosphere surrounding an Earth-like, rocky planet orbiting within the habitable zone of another star. The finding ...
Astrobiology
Jul 16, 2026
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Astronomers find nearby planets to be small, strange, and utterly uninhabitable
Scientists have painted the most detailed portrait yet of the planetary system orbiting Barnard's Star—the sun's closest neighbor after Alpha Centauri, just under six light-years from Earth.
Astrobiology
Jul 15, 2026
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Alien world chemistry found inside meteorite that struck New Jersey home
On July 16, 2024, a daytime meteor shook New York City with a sonic boom as it passed just south of the Statue of Liberty. Now, an international team of researchers reports in the journal Science Advances that a short time ...
Space Exploration
Jul 15, 2026
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Are we missing the universe's 'noosignatures?'
Astrobiology has long been split into two camps: a search for "biosignatures" and a search for "intelligence." These look for very different things, but they also leave a huge gap in between. It took 3.5 billion years for ...
Astrobiology
Jul 14, 2026
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Data-driven tool can find mineral biosignatures on other worlds
A technique for judging whether a common mineral formed through biological activity could aid the search for ancient life on Earth and Mars. Apatite is a ubiquitous phosphate mineral found in terrestrial and extraterrestrial ...
Astrobiology
Jul 14, 2026
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Six massive landslides discovered on icy Pluto
Scientists have detected evidence of landslides on Pluto for the first time. A paper published in the journal Icarus reports that images taken by the New Horizons spacecraft during a flyby revealed six large landslides in ...
Study reports the first detection of a sugar in interstellar space
Sugars are key biomolecules in living organisms, as they form the backbone of DNA and RNA and play a fundamental role in metabolic processes. In theories of the origin of life, sugars are also essential for the synthesis ...
Astronomy
Jul 13, 2026
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Could exoplanets locked in eternal day and endless night support life?
Ever so slightly bigger than Earth, the exoplanet LHS 3844b orbits its parent star, LHS 3844, a red dwarf 48.5 light-years from our solar system. Its rotational speed mirrors its orbital speed. The result? One side of LHS ...
Astrobiology
Jul 10, 2026
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Newborn stars preserve organic-rich gas within ancient supernova debris
For the first time, astronomers have discovered stellar cocoons rich in complex organic molecules within a supernova remnant. A research team from Niigata University, Gifu University, RIKEN and Kyoto University in Japan used ...
Astronomy
Jul 9, 2026
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Baseline tool could separate alien life signals from geology on ocean worlds
When it comes to the search for life elsewhere in the universe, methane and other chemical compounds are seen as signs of biology because they are often produced by living microbes. However, scientists can be misled because ...
Much of Earth's 'space dust' may come from unidentified near-Earth asteroids
Like a shelf in an old house, the Earth collects a lot of dust from its surroundings. This "space dust" is mostly made up of micrometeorites that survive atmospheric entry and provides researchers with a cheap and easy way ...
It's disturbingly easy to trick AI into seeing aliens, say researchers
Are we alone in the universe? Consider mysterious "extraterrestrial" radio signals. Unexplained gases on other planets. Things mistaken for UFOs.
Astronomy
Jul 7, 2026
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More news
Nautilus array to track missing exoplanet atmospheres
The rise of space AI might explain the Fermi paradox
Texas wine grapes launch to space for research mission
Lava planet has hydrogen-rich, active atmosphere
Could Earth have sent life to Jupiter's moon Europa?
Other news
Scientists discover 210-million-year-old dinosaur in Zimbabwe
Ultracold neutrons don't disappear into the mirror world
'Bag of Bones' preserves rare three-tier prehistoric meal in Outback Queensland
Where not to look in the search for ET
Scientists uncover two new ways doxycycline disables bacterial ribosomes
Nanomace catalyst boosts greenhouse gas breakdown up to 14.4-fold
