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The Search for Life

Seven Earth-sized worlds around a single nearby star, vent communities thriving without sunlight in the deepest trench on the planet, and the recalculation that may have quietly dissolved the Fermi paradox.

The question of whether life exists beyond Earth is the oldest in astronomy and, until thirty years ago, the most embarrassingly speculative. That changed in 1995, when Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz detected a planet around the Sun-like star 51 Pegasi. Today the catalog of confirmed exoplanets exceeds 5,800. A handful, fewer than thirty, depending on which definition of habitability is used, sit in the right temperature zone around their stars for liquid water to exist on their surfaces.

The most important target of all is forty light-years away. TRAPPIST-1 is a small, red, faint star with seven Earth-sized rocky planets transiting it. Three are in the habitable zone. The James Webb Space Telescope has now spent two years measuring their atmospheres in transmission spectroscopy. The results are clarifying and, in places, disappointing, the two innermost worlds appear to have lost their atmospheres entirely to the star's flare activity. The outer worlds are still being characterized. The TRAPPIST-1 program is the closest thing the field has to a clean experiment on whether terrestrial planets around red dwarfs can hold onto the chemistry life needs.

The other strand of the search is closer to home. Europa, the second of Jupiter's Galilean moons, is sheathed in ice and hides a salt-water ocean estimated to contain twice the volume of all Earth's oceans combined. Enceladus, around Saturn, sprays its ocean into space through cracks in its south polar terrain, material that the Cassini spacecraft flew through and sampled. Both moons appear to have hydrothermal vents on their seafloors, and on Earth, the equivalent vents in the Mariana Trench host the densest non-photosynthetic ecosystems on the planet. Europa Clipper is on its way. Enceladus is the leading target for the mission after.

And then there is the awkward fact that, in 13.8 billion years, no one appears to have visited. Enrico Fermi asked the question over lunch at Los Alamos in 1950. In 2018, three researchers at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute showed that the entire premise of the paradox depends on a statistical assumption that, when corrected, dissolves it. We may be alone. We may not be. The honest answer, sharpened by the work below, is that the universe being silent means almost nothing.

15 Articles
Artist's impression of the rocky surface of Proxima Centauri b with the dim red disk of its host star low on the horizon. Cosmology · Exoplanets · Habitability

The Habitable World Next Door That Its Star May Have Sterilized

Proxima Centauri b orbits the closest star to the Sun, inside the zone where liquid water could exist. The problem is the star itself, a red dwarf that flares hard enough to strip a planet bare.

June 12, 2026 15 min read
A solitary Jupiter-like planet glows faintly against the black of interstellar space, lit only by its own residual heat with no star nearby. Cosmology · Exoplanets · Rogue Planets

The Planets That Drift Through the Dark

Untethered to any star, rogue worlds may outnumber the suns of the Milky Way. Here is how astronomers find the invisible, and why one of these frozen wanderers might still hide an ocean.

June 17, 2026 14 min read
A JWST coronagraphic image showing the bright host star 29 Cygni masked at upper right, with the faint off-white point of its giant planet 29 Cygni b resolved against the dark background. Cosmology · Exoplanets · Direct Imaging

The Planet That Webb Actually Photographed

Around a bright star in Cygnus, the James Webb Space Telescope blocked the glare of the star itself and captured the faint thermal glow of a world fifteen times the mass of Jupiter. 29 Cygni b is a rare thing: not an inferred planet, but a photographed one.

June 28, 2026 14 min read
A multi-ringed protoplanetary disk of dust and gas around a young star, with concentric bright rings separated by dark gaps where forming planets clear their orbits. Cosmology · Exoplanets · Planet Formation

Two Planets Caught in the Act of Being Born

Around a young Sun-like star called WISPIT 2, astronomers have directly imaged a gas giant glowing inside a dark gap in a multi-ringed disk, and then a second forming world closer in. It is the cleanest case yet of watching a planetary system assemble itself.

June 21, 2026 14 min read
Artist's rendering of a cool brown dwarf, a dim reddish sphere with banded cloud layers glowing faintly against the dark of space. Astrophysics · Stellar Evolution · Brown Dwarfs

The Stars That Almost Were

Brown dwarfs are too heavy to be planets and too light to ignite as stars. They are the objects the galaxy started building and then quietly set aside, and the coldest of them now hovers near the freezing point of water.

July 9, 2026 14 min read
The original 1977 computer printout of the Wow! Signal showing the intensity code 6EQUJ5 circled in red with the handwritten word Wow Signals & Anomalies · SETI · Radio Astronomy

The 72 Seconds That Still Haunt Radio Astronomy

On a summer night in 1977, an Ohio radio telescope recorded a narrowband burst near the frequency of hydrogen itself. An astronomer circled the printout and wrote one word. Almost fifty years later, no one has heard it again.

June 11, 2026 14 min read
Artist's illustration of a swarm of dusty comet fragments passing in front of a bright F-type star, dimming its light Signals & Anomalies · Stellar Anomalies · Exocomets

The Star That Flickers Like Nothing Else in the Sky

For four years, a telescope watched one ordinary-looking star lose up to a fifth of its light in jagged, unpredictable plunges. The leading suspect is dust, not aliens, and the case is still not fully closed.

June 20, 2026 14 min read
Artist's rendering of a dark, barren rocky exoplanet with one molten dayside facing a small red dwarf star Cosmology · Exoplanets · Astrobiology

The First Exoplanet Whose Surface We Have Actually Seen

For the first time, the James Webb Space Telescope has read the bare rock of a world 48.5 light-years away. LHS 3844 b is a dark, hot, airless slab of basalt, and what it tells us about life is written in what is missing.

June 2, 2026 14 min read
Hubble image of the edge-on protoplanetary disk IRAS 23077+6707, nicknamed Dracula's Chivito, showing a dark central dust lane between two glowing nebulae with wispy filaments. Astrophysics · Star Formation · Protoplanetary Disks

Hubble's Look Inside the Largest Planet Nursery Ever Found

A young star 1,000 light-years away is wrapped in a disk so vast it could swallow forty solar systems. When Hubble looked closely, it found something the textbooks did not predict: chaos.

June 3, 2026 14 min read
Pristine sample of asteroid Bennu returned by OSIRIS-REx, photographed in NASA's Johnson Space Center clean room Cosmology · Astrobiology · Asteroids

The Asteroid Sample That Brought Back Almost Every Ingredient for Life

Fifteen of the twenty amino acids life uses. All five DNA and RNA bases. Ribose. Glucose. And a polymer never seen anywhere else in space. NASA opened a 121-gram sample from a 500-meter asteroid and found pieces of the chemistry that built every living thing on Earth.

May 23, 2026 16 min read
Artist's reconstruction of a deep-sea hydrothermal vent system on the early Earth, similar to where LUCA may have originated Cosmology · Astrobiology · Origin of Life

Every Living Thing on Earth Descended From One Cell. We Now Know Roughly Where It Lived.

Three billion years ago, perhaps four, a single cell at the bottom of an ocean was the ancestor of every plant, animal, fungus, and microbe ever to exist. A 2024 paper has dated it more precisely than any analysis before.

May 29, 2026 15 min read
Artist's impression of the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system Cosmology · Exoplanets · Astrobiology

Seven Earth-Sized Worlds Around One Star, and What James Webb Just Found Out About Them

TRAPPIST-1 has seven Earth-sized planets at 40 light-years from Earth. Three sit in the habitable zone. JWST has spent two years probing their atmospheres. The picture is clarifying, and uncomfortable in places.

May 20, 2026 17 min read
NASA Galileo image of Jupiter's moon Europa showing its icy surface Cosmology · Astrobiology · Icy Moons

The Deepest Place on Earth Tells Us What to Look For on Europa

At 10,935 meters down, in pitch darkness and pressure that would crush a submarine, life persists. Tube worms grow two meters long around hydrothermal vents that exist on no map. The same kind of vent, the same chemistry, possibly the same biology, is the leading candidate for where life beyond Earth might exist. Europa Clipper is on its way.

May 10, 2026 16 min read
Hubble Extreme Deep Field showing thousands of distant galaxies Cosmology · Astrobiology · SETI

Where Is Everybody?, and Why the Most Famous Question in Astronomy Just Got Quietly Demolished by Math

Enrico Fermi reportedly asked the question over lunch at Los Alamos in 1950. For seventy-five years it has been one of the most cited puzzles in science. In 2018, three Oxford researchers showed with one careful recalculation that the entire premise of the paradox might be wrong, and the universe being silent might mean exactly nothing.

May 9, 2026 15 min read
Wide-field image of the Pleiades star cluster (Messier 45) showing bright blue stars wreathed in reflection nebulosity Astrophysics · Star Clusters · Pleiades

If You Stood on a World in the Pleiades, This Is What You'd See

Messier 45 is the most photographed open cluster in the sky and one of the closest. No planet has ever been confirmed orbiting any of its 1,300 stars. And yet on one of them, a quiet F-type star named HD 23514, colliding embryos appear to be building a planet right now.

April 23, 2026 14 min read