Super-Earth Laboratory: Using HD 20794 d to Understand Habitability
Release Date: 04/01/2025
LaserSETI Update: On Exhibit in London and a New Station in Puerto Rico
SETI Live
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, exoplanets, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. LaserSETI represents a new frontier in SETI, using a global network of instruments to continuously scan the night sky for brief laser pulses—potential signs of technology from...
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Could Aliens See Us? What Earth’s Technosphere Reveals
SETI Live
🌍 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 search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). 🚀 From stable zero-growth societies to interstellar expansion, Dr. Haqq-Misra’s team models how...
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Mars’ Ancient Carbon Cycle: How Rocks on Mars Tell the Story of a Vanishing Climate
SETI Live
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 processes. Dr. Ben Tutolo, associate professor at the University of Calgary and participating scientist on NASA's Curiosity rover team, explains that as Mars'...
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Titan’s Missing Deltas? What Cassini Saw — and What It Didn’t
SETI Live
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 surprising absence of deltas—landforms typically formed when rivers deposit sediment at their mouths. This finding challenges existing geological...
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A Cookbook of Life: How Chemistry Might Explain Life on Other Planets
SETI Live
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 astrobiologist Dr. Betül Kaçar, this study reframes our understanding of how life can emerge from simple chemistry. Discover how these "chemical recipes" might...
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Red Planet, Blue Past: How Rain Shaped the Martian Landscape
SETI Live
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 that Mars was predominantly cold and dry, instead supporting the idea of a warmer, wetter climate during the Noachian epoch, approximately 4.1 to 3.7 billion...
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Tiny Asteroids, Big Threats: JWST Reveals a Hidden World of Mini Asteroids
SETI Live
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 meters in diameter, which would be considered city-killers. Even smaller asteroids, such as the 20-meter one that exploded over Chelyabinsk in 2013, can cause...
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Is Intelligent Life Easy? Human-Like Life Probably Evolves "Right on Time"
SETI Live
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 argue that Earth's environment underwent sequential "windows of habitability," periods when conditions became favorable for complex life to emerge. (Past Drake Award...
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Unistellar + Citizen Science Q&A (Part 6): Comet SWAN, Satellites, Asteroid Leona
SETI Live
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 to an occultation of asteroid 319 Leona. We will also answer your questions about our program from the Unistellar community page and discuss recent highlights....
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Chasing Martian Microbes: A New Technique for Finding Microbial Fossils in Minerals
SETI Live
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, demonstrating a method that could one day help search for traces of life on Mars. Their findings, published in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences, highlight how...
info_outlineWith 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 compelling subject for further study. This breakthrough, built on two decades of observations with the world’s most advanced telescopes, has just been published in Astronomy & Astrophysics. Join planetary astronomer Franck Marchis and lead author Nicola Nari for a discussion on the search for exoplanets, what a habitable world could look like, and how HD 20794 d will help us understand our universe. (Recorded live 20 March 2025.)