Science

Panspermia

It’s possible that frozen worlds with subterranean oceans are incubators of organic life. But then how did life get here?

Balazs Bradak

Uncertain contact

The detection of alien life won’t be obvious. It’ll be partial and inconclusive: a perfect task for the scientific method

Jaime Green

In the search for life, might alien ocean worlds be a better bet than Earth-like planets?

5 minutes

Cosmic vision

By showing us a new cosmos, the discoveries of the James Webb Space Telescope will ripple through our moral universe

Claire Isabel Webb

There’s no planet B

The scientific evidence is clear: the only celestial body that can support us is the one we evolved with. Here’s why

Arwen E Nicholson & Raphaëlle D Haywood

Bat-people on the Moon – what a famed 1835 hoax reveals about misinformation today

8 minutes

Thriving on Mars

Dust storms, long distances and freezing temperatures make living on Mars magnificently challenging. How will we do it?

Simon Morden

Inventing heaven

For hundreds of years, Christians knew exactly where heaven was: above us and above the stars. Then came the new cosmologists

Stephen Case

How one of history’s most beautiful books was used to find fate in the cosmos

6 minutes

Telescopes on the Moon

Our future in space relies on settling the Moon and using it as a base to probe the deepest questions in the cosmos

Joseph Silk

Raw solar-storm footage is the punk-rock antidote to sleek James Webb imagery

6 minutes

From zero to 5,000 – music and visuals express 30 years of exoplanet discoveries

1 minute

Revisiting ‘Powers of Ten’ – what we’ve learned about the Universe since 1977

7 minutes

Models capture the world-warping physics of what happens when stars meet black holes

2 minutes

The search for alien tech

There’s a new plan to find extraterrestrial civilisations by the way they live. But if we can see them, can they see us?

Corey S Powell

Jocelyn Bell discovered pulsars. The Nobel Prize went to her supervisor

16 minutes

Meet the citizen scientist who changed how we see the Sun, and science itself

5 minutes

Riches in space

Asteroids could pay for so much space exploration. We just need to mine those valuable resources – and duck a direct hit

Martin Elvis

Contact

An alien-made artefact or just interstellar debris? What ʻOumuamua says about how science works when data is scarce

Matthew Bothwell

Huygens, senior and junior

How a father’s mere curiosity about nature evolved during the Dutch Golden Age into the son’s focused scientific enquiry

Hugh Aldersey-Williams

How science finally caught up with Einstein’s prediction of gravitational waves

13 minutes

Do we send the goo?

The ability to stir new life into being, all across the Universe, compels us to ask why life matters in the first place

Betül Kaçar

How do you message an alien? Carl Sagan offers some simple suggestions

8 minutes