SETI Live

Last week, the NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory released its First Look images, including stunning views of the Trifid and Lagoon nebulae, an astounding Cosmic Treasure Chest of stars and galaxies, and a "swarm" of newly discovered asteroids. Captured in a mere ten hours of observing time, this preview gave us a taste of what is to come for the groundbreaking observatory. As the press release states, "Rubin’s innovative 8.4-meter telescop...

A major new exhibition at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, Space: Could Life Exist Beyond Earth?, runs from May 17, 2025, to January 4, 2026, and will feature a complete LaserSETI instrument on display. The exhibit explores one of humanity’s most profound questions: Are we alone in the universe? The exhibition brings together cutting-edge science, captivating artifacts, and the latest research in astrobiology, exopla...

🌍 What Will Earth Look Like in 1000 Years? Will humanity collapse, thrive, or colonize the stars—and could alien civilizations detect us? Join senior planetary astronomer Dr. Franck Marchis for a fascinating conversation with Dr. Jacob Haqq-Misra, astrobiologist and lead author of a groundbreaking study exploring 10 possible futures for Earth’s technosphere—the global network of our technologies—and what these futures mean for the...

Join planetary scientist Beth Johnson as we explore a groundbreaking discovery from NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars. Scientists have identified siderite—a rare iron carbonate mineral—within ancient Martian rocks, offering new insights into Mars' once-thicker atmosphere and its now-lost carbon cycle. This discovery reshapes our understanding of the Red Planet's climate history and helps us draw powerful parallels to Earth's carbon pr...

Why are Titan’s river deltas missing? Planetary astronomer Franck Marchis taps in for Beth Johnson to chat with Brown University’s Sam Birch and explore a strange and unexpected mystery on Saturn’s largest moon. Using data from NASA’s Cassini mission and advanced computer modeling, Birch’s team reveals that Titan's shorelines defy Earth-like expectations. Despite Titan's known rivers and seas of liquid methane, the team found a sur...

What if the origin of life isn’t a one-in-a-billion cosmic fluke, but something that happens whenever the conditions are just right? Join communications specialist Beth Johnson as we explore groundbreaking research from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where scientists have identified over 270 self-replicating chemical reactions that may have sparked life, not just on Earth, but potentially anywhere in the universe. Led by astr...

A groundbreaking study from the University of Colorado Boulder suggests that ancient Mars was far from the cold, arid planet we know today. Led by Amanda Steckel, the research team utilized computer simulations to reveal that billions of years ago, Mars experienced significant precipitation—either rain or snow—that carved out extensive networks of valleys and channels across its surface. These findings challenge previous theories t...

One significant threat to life here on Earth is the possibility that a massive asteroid will collide with our planet and destroy life as we know it. To understand the possibilities, large surveys of the sky have found around 95% of potentially hazardous asteroids larger than a kilometer. Smaller asteroids, however, can also cause massive amounts of damage. Estimates range from 40 to 60 percent when it comes to asteroids over 100 me...

​A recent study proposes a new model for the evolution of intelligent life, which challenges the long-standing "hard steps" theory that the emergence of intelligent life is an exceedingly rare event due to a series of improbable evolutionary milestones. A team led by postdoctoral researcher Dan Mills from the University of Munich suggests that the development of intelligent life is a natural outcome of planetary evolution. They arg...

Join Dr. Franck Marchis, Chief Science Officer and co-founder at Unistellar and director of Citizen Science at SETI Institute, and Dr. Lauren Sgro, Outreach Manager at the SETI Institute, for a conversation on citizen science with the Unistellar network in partnership with the SETI Institute. We will give an update on T CrB, share our new Satellites mode, discuss an exoplanet candidate campaign to confirm a planet, and look ahead t...

A road trip to a gypsum quarry in Algeria led Youcef Sellam on a journey of scientific discovery. From the road trip to an internship in Italy, he and his colleagues later discovered microbial fossils—marking a first for Algerian gypsum. As a Ph.D. student at the University of Bern, Sellam and his team took this research further. They used a special instrument to detect the chemical signatures of these ancient microbes, demonstrati...

In a recent study, Dr. Janice Bishop of the SETI Institute, along with postdoctoral researcher Adomas Valantinas from Brown University, propose that Mars' characteristic red hue is primarily due to ferrihydrite—a water-rich iron oxide mineral—rather than the previously assumed hematite. Analyses of data collected by Martian orbiters, rovers, and laboratory experiments showed that ferrihydrite closely matches the composition of the ...

In The Climate Chronicles, a podcast with 42 episodes across eight seasons, Professor Dagomar Degroot of Georgetown University "takes you on a journey through 50 million years of climate change." He delves into how climate change has shaped civilizations—from the earliest hominid ancestors to the present era of rapid global warming. Through storytelling and historical analysis, he reveals the profound influence of climate on human ...

With over 7,000 exoplanets identified in our galaxy, scientists are shifting their focus to studying these worlds' characteristics in the quest for extraterrestrial life. The backdrop for one team is the discovery of super-Earth HD 20794 d, an exoplanet detected by researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and NCCR PlanetS. Orbiting in an eccentric path, HD 20794 d moves in and out of its star’s habitable zone, making it a ...

The OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer) mission has been a resounding success, from taking a sample of asteroid Bennu to returning that sample to Earth. The first in-depth analysis of the space rocks is complete, and the results have been published in Nature and Nature Astronomy. One of the most intriguing results shows that 14 of the 20 amino acids life on Earth us...

NASA’s Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere, or PUNCH mission, is a constellation of four small satellites in low Earth orbit that will make global, 3D observations of the Sun’s corona to better understand how the mass and energy there become the solar wind that fills the solar system. Imaging the Sun’s corona and the solar wind together will help scientists better understand the entire inner heliosphere—the Sun, solar w...

During his time as an Artist in Residence (AIR) at the SETI Institute, visual artist, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst Martin Wilner invited prominent SETI Institute scientists to participate in his ongoing project, The Case Histories. Interested in exploring how scientists relate to the possibility of encountering an alien life form, Wilner invited researchers such as Jill Tarter, Seth Shostak, and Franck Marchis to send him daily ...

Over the past decade, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has captured thousands of high-resolution images of the Moon's surface—far more than humans can manually review. To tackle this challenge, scientists have developed an automated system that quickly identifies scientifically significant images from the LRO data, making it the first anomaly detector for planetary imagery. Experiments show that the system reliably highlig...

If an extraterrestrial civilization existed with technology similar to ours, would they be able to detect Earth and evidence of humanity? If so, what signals would they detect, and from how far away? Researchers used a theoretical, modeling-based method, and this study is the first to analyze multiple types of technosignatures together rather than separately. The findings revealed that radio signals, such as planetary radar emissio...