Now on a three-month, million-mile journey to its final orbit, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will soon reveal the universe’s darkest secrets. The

If an alien civilization could see Earth only as a single pale blue dot, what could they learn? We start with transit spectroscopy, the biosignature cocktail of oxygen, methane, ozone, and water, and ...

Explore life’s origins, astrobiology, consciousness, and humanity’s place in the cosmos through science and the humanities.

Searching for habitable worlds beyond our solar system consists of more than just having it orbit within its star’s habitable zone, which is the region where temperatures could be just right for liqui...

What if consciousness isn’t limited to brains like ours? Philosophers Eric Schwitzgebel and Jeremy Pober argue that consciousness could arise in many different forms of life, even in beings built from...

We have spent centuries being knocked off our pedestal. Earth isn't the centre of the Solar System, the Sun isn't the centre of the Galaxy, and we are not the point around which everything else turns....

A decade ago, we discovered an exceptionally exciting exoplanet that could be the best candidate for hosting alien life. Now we’re about to find out if it really is

Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have uncovered a rare world unlike anything in our solar system — a giant planet about the size of Saturn with surprisingly Earth-like temperatures ...

A hidden crater in South Korea may hold clues to one of the biggest turning points in Earth’s history: the rise of oxygen. Scientists discovered fossil-like stromatolites — layered structures built by...

The Research Program at the Intersection of Life Sciences & Quantum AI, or REPLIQA, brings together U of A researchers from science and engineering fields to lay a foundation for new biological discov...

Podcast Episode · Strange New Worlds: A Science & Star Trek Podcast · April 28 · 1h 11m

After years of lab work, the results are in: A rock that NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover drilled and analyzed in 2020 includes the most diverse collection of

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 biosignatur...

The fictional biologist in ‘Project Hail Mary’ claims that potential alien organisms might not be made of carbon or require water, unlike life on Earth.

High in the Chilean Andes, at an altitude where the air is thin and the Sun is intense, a salt flat is hiding something remarkable. Locked inside ancient crystals of gypsum are the preserved remains o...

Most astronomers agree that life is likely common throughout the Universe. While Earth is the only world known to have life, we know that life arose early on our world, and the building blocks of life...

A team of NASA researchers is developing new types of optical masks that could help enable the many orders of magnitude of starlight suppression needed for future space observatories to pick out very ...

In one of the biggest surprises of the OSIRIS-REx mission, its target asteroid, Bennu, turned out to be a jagged, rugged world covered in large boulders.

Dedication Ceremony Celebrates Taṣogida Ki: Center for Astronomy Outreach at NSF Kitt Peak National Observatory

“Follow the water” has been a guiding mantra of astrobiology, and even space exploration more generally for decades. If you want to find life, it makes sense to look for the universal solvent that alm...

The Tucson Festival of Books returns to Tucson March 14-15, inviting visitors to step inside the world of cutting-edge discovery at the interactive Science City with more than 30 U of A departments an...