Exoplanets

Hints of life on distant worlds will come from signals pioneered by NASA’s jumbo space telescope

Hints of water vapor on a world called GJ 486 b could just as well come from the planet’s host star

A dying star swallowing a giant planet hints at the fate awaiting our solar system some five billion years from now

For centuries, scientific discoveries have suggested humanity occupies no privileged place in the universe. Now, however, studies of worlds beyond our solar system could place meaningful new limits on our existential mediocrity

A promising combination of exoplanet-finding methods pinpoints details about its first world

Red dwarfs are dim bulbs but host more Earth-like planets than any other kind of star

Do efforts to create life—by cooking up imitations in computers, robots and molecules—point toward a universal definition of biology?

TRAPPIST-1b is probably an airless rock, but the same may not be true for its six Earth-sized siblings

A new study suggests that ‘Oumuamua, the mysterious visitor that whizzed through our solar system in 2017, may have been merely a small comet from another star

Before exploding as supernovae, massive Wolf-Rayet stars spew gas and dust into space, seeding the formation of future stellar and planetary systems

SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, is deploying machine-learning algorithms that filter out earthly interference and spot signals humans might miss

The James Webb Space Telescope is opening an exciting new chapter in the study of exoplanets and the search for life beyond Earth