Extraterrestrial Life

NASA's planet hunter has identified more than 700 candidate extrasolar worlds that have yet to be confirmed, including some that may be Earth-size

Bountiful carbonate minerals in a rock outcrop on the Red Planet could have formed under watery greenhouse conditions billions of years ago

In addition to reacting to news as it breaks, we work to anticipate what will happen. Here we contemplate 12 possibilities and rate their likelihood of happening by 2050

Ewoks and the Na'vi may be pure fiction, but Endor and Pandora, the moons they inhabit, appear closer to reality

Micrometeorites buried under decades of snowfall in Antarctica preserve scraps of cosmic chemistry that hint at how organic molecules made it to Earth

The asteroid 24 Themis has organic material and a layer of frost, bolstering theories that asteroids could have seeded Earth with both water and the precursors to life

Techniques now coming of age allow astronomers to more easily photograph distant planets rather than inferring their presence indirectly

Researchers have found in the deep ocean the first-known kinds of multicellular organisms, dubbed Loricifera, that live completely oxygen-free. Cynthia Graber reports

Samples could reveal unique life forms from beneath the ice.

The COROT satellite has found a Jupiter-size world in a relatively temperate Mercury-like orbit