Universe Today
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Astrobiology
The search for life in the universe
Recent Articles
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Astrochemical Model Digs Into the Universe's Missing Sulfur
Sulfur is one of the most abundant elements in the universe. If you peer into a diffuse interstellar cloud, you find loads of it - about the amount expected based on fusion patterns of the stars it was born in. However, if you look at a dense, cold, molecular cloud - the kind where those stars actually form - it seems like 99% of the sulfur that is expected to be there is missing. Scientists have puzzled over this “missing sulfur problem” for decades, though a leading theory is that the element hides on icy dust grains making it hard to detect. A new paper published in Astronomy & Astrophysics from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and the Centro de Astrobiologia describes a new computer simulation model that they aimed to support the interpretation of laboratory results and test our current understanding of sulfur evolution in interstellar ices.
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David Kipping Has a New Take on the Existence of Advanced Life in the Universe... and the Numbers are Not Encouraging!
DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2606.04044
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Astronomers Find a Four-Carbon Sugar in Deep Space
The space between stars may seem like a barren desert, but over the past few decades scientists have been finding all sorts of interesting chemicals in it. From the precursors to proteins to the building blocks of cell membranes, there has been discovery after discovery of new molecules in the giant gas clouds between the stars. Now, a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv details the discovery of the first ever four-carbon sugar in the Interstellar Medium (ISM), and it is another brick on the path to understanding how life on Earth first developed.
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SETI Panel Revises Recommendations for Dealing With 'Disclosure Day'
An international committee of experts says it has updated its rules for evaluating and revealing the detection of extraterrestrial intelligence. The revisions to the decades-old Declaration of Principles, created and maintained by the International Academy of Astronautics' SETI Committee, come just days before the release of "Disclosure Day," a movie about alien visitation directed by Steven Spielberg.
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Astrobiology's Looming Statistical Crisis
Multi-billion dollar space telescope programs aren’t only feats of aerospace engineering. They also feature “lies, damn lies, and statistics”. Or at least statistics. They definitely feature those, as does all good observational astronomy. The problem with statistics is, in order to get a clear definitive answer, you need lots of samples. And, to put it mildly, it’s hard to find lots of samples of planets with alien life on them. And even harder to prove that the signals we think are caused by alien life aren’t caused by some other non-biological process. Or at least that’s the theory underpinning a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv from David Kipping of Columbia University (and Cool Worlds YouTube fame).
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Alien life may be missed by current space missions, but AI might help
It’s 2035 and NASA’s Dragonfly quadcopter has been “hopping” around the surface of Saturn’s largest moon Titan for just over a year taking images, scanning pebbles, drilling holes, and analyzing surface material for potential signs of life. You’re at NASA JPL and just moved to Blue Team (12am-8am) from Red Team (4pm-12am), so you’re hyped up on coffee, Red Bull, and will power. It’s 3:30am, you’ve been analyzing data since you clocked in, and you keep discarding what you’ve been told looks like positive signs of life but is more commonly known as false positives. In the meantime, some microbes on Titan that got scanned by Dragonfly keep posing in front of its main camera with signs saying, “We’re here!”
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We've Been Listening for Ten Years. Here's What We Heard
For ten years, astronomers at UCLA have been pointing one of the world's most powerful radio telescopes at the stars and listening. Not for pulsars or gas clouds, or the hiss of the cosmic microwave background, but for something far more extraordinary. A signal from another civilisation. The result of a decade's work, 70,000 stars, and 100 million candidate signals is now in and every single one of them was us! But far from being a disappointment, the findings are among the most rigorous and revealing in the history of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
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Forget Searching for Individual Biosignatures. Instead, Find Their Patterns
The search for life elsewhere focuses on biosignatures. These are chemicals in atmospheres that can only be attributed to life. But despite the prowess of the JWST, finding slam-dunk proof of life on other worlds is a confounding exercise. New research suggests that rather than focus on individual chemicals, we should look for statistical patterns.
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The Rock That Built Life
Life didn't just happen on Earth, a new study suggests that the slow, grinding rise of our planet's continents more than 3.7 billion years ago may have done something extraordinary. Instead it carefully calibrated the chemistry of the ancient oceans to create precisely the conditions life needed to get started. The unlikely hero of the story is a semi precious gemstone.
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Study Identifies Geysers the JUICE Mission Could Explore on Ganymede
A new international scientific study by the Hellenic Space Center (HSC) has identified some of the most promising candidate cryovolcanic regions on Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. These regions represent important targets for future observations by the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE).
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“Simplified Proteins” Reveal the Biochemical Dawn of Early Earth
When researchers look up at the sky and wonder if we’re not alone, they also realize the origins of life here on Earth might hold the key to finding out. The chaotic chemical soup of our early world eventually led to the staggering complexity of modern life, but how exactly did it start? Proteins were one of the key ingredients in the early years, but we’re still only just discovering how these marvels of modern biology first managed to fold, function, and survive. A new review paper, The borderlands of foldability: lessons from simplified proteins, published recently in Trends in Chemistry, showcases how scientists are attempting to answer this question - by researching “simplified proteins”.
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Tough Fungi Could Survive the Trip to Mars
NASA and other space agencies spend a lot of time and money considering the cleanliness of their missions. Billions of dollars are spent in and on cleanrooms every year, with the express effort of ensuring both that the equipment operates without interference, but also that we don’t accidentally contaminate our exploration target with life from Earth itself. So far, we have primarily focused on bacteria in our efforts to stop this contamination, but according to a new paper by Atul M. Chander of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and his co-authors, we might be missing an entirely different threat - fungi.
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MSL Curiosity Found New Organic Chemicals On Mars, Proof That The Planet Can Preserve Ancient Biosignatures
MSL Curiosity found 7 new organic molecules preserved in Martian sandstone. While they aren't proof that life existed on Mars, they are important. They show that the planet is capable of protecting ancient biosignatures from radiation and preserving them in rock.
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Life Beyond Biosignatures: A New Method In The Search For Life
Researchers from the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) and National Institute for Basic Biology have developed a new method to detect extraterrestrial life without relying on traditional biosignatures. By modelling how life might spread between planets, they demonstrate that life could be detected through statistical patterns across planetary populations rather than on individual planets. This "agnostic biosignature" approach could assist in guiding future searches for life beyond Earth.
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The Craters that Made Us
What if the same collisions we think of as forces of destruction were actually the spark that created life on Earth? New research published in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering is making a compelling case that meteor impacts didn't just reshape our planet's surface, instead that they may have built the very cradles where life first emerged.
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If Life Exists in Venus' Atmosphere, It Could Have Come From Earth
A new study presented at the 2026 LPSC suggests that if life does exist in Venus' clouds, there's a chance it came from Earth.
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Exomoons Could Be Habitable for Billions of Years, Provided they have Hydrogen Atmospheres
Liquid water is considered essential for life. Surprisingly, however, stable conditions that are conducive to life could exist far from any sun. A research team from the Excellence Cluster ORIGINS at LMU and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) has shown that moons around free-floating planets can keep their water oceans liquid for up to 4.3 billion years by virtue of dense hydrogen atmospheres and tidal heating—that is to say, for almost as long as Earth has existed and sufficient time for complex life to develop.
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How Will Martian Gravity Affect Skeletal Muscle?
Marie Mortreux, an assistant professor in the University of Rhode Island’s College of Health Sciences, is part of an international team of researchers studying how the Mars’s gravity would affect astronauts’ skeletal muscle.
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Why Conventional SETI Needs A Major Refocus
After decades of searching for alien signals in narrow radio and microwave bandwidths, a new paper suggests that we take a wholly different approach. The idea is to broaden the search to a much wider range of the electromagnetic spectrum.