Is anybody out there? Probably. Most stars have planets; we've discovered more than 6,000 exoplanets thus far, and the most basic statistics point toward the existence of countless potentially ...

For decades, science fiction writers have tried their best to prepare us for eventual contact with aliens. Their efforts are dominated by several recurrent tropes. There's the invasion by a warlike ...

In 1995, a pair of scientists discovered a planet outside our solar system orbiting a solar-type star. Since that finding—which won the scientists a portion of the 2019 Nobel Prize in ...

When ET phones home, it could be his last call. Contrary to sci-fi movie depictions, our first contact might not be with a super advanced alien civilization at the height of power. Rather, Ivy League ...

For decades, humans have scanned for signals of alien technology emanating through the galaxy. The search highlights the contradiction between the abundance of planets and stars that stretch across ...

“There is a silence in the night sky that has bothered me for as long as I can remember.” That line, attributed to Richard Feynman, lands because it gets at a simple, stubborn feeling. The sky looks ...

Astronomer Dr. David Kipping argued that we're more likely to meet a "unusually loud" extraterrestrials whose empire is on the decline. When ET phones home, it could be his last call. Contrary to ...