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 powe...

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 l...

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 an...

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 fin...

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 whe...

​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 outco...

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...

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...

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 clos...

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 prof...

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...

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...

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...

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, an...

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 sh...

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 signa...

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 review the 2024 citizen science accomplishments and discuss the 2025 campaigns so far. We will answer y...

New research using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope reveals that planet formation can occur in harsh, high-radiation stellar environments. This contradicts earlier assumptions and suggests planet formation is more resilient than previously thought. The study observed protoplanetary disks within the Sigma Orionis cluster, finding structures indicating potential plan...

Happy New Year! 2024 brought us a lot of exciting space news, from a total solar eclipse to the launch of Europa Clipper and our celebration of 40 years as the SETI Institute. What does 2025 hold? Join hosts Beth Johnson and Franck Marchis for our first show of the year, taking a look at new ground and space telescopes, planned missions and milestones, as well as the various eclipses. Plus, Saturn...

Join communications specialist Beth Johnson and historian Rebecca Charbonneau as they discuss Dr. Charbonneau's new book, Mixed Signals. The book examines the Cold War relationship between the US and the USSR, what it meant for radio astronomy, and how it affected the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. (Recorded live on 19 December 2024.)

Get ready to giggle and make bad jokes. Uranus is back in the news. In 1986, Voyager 2 flew by the distant ice giant and made a strange discovery—the planet's magnetic field was weird. It's not just weird; it's unlike every other planet in the solar system. For nearly 40 years, scientists have tried to understand why. To solve the mystery, researchers delved into the data collected by Voyager 2 an...

Imagine that scene from every apocalyptic asteroid movie—you know the one. The scientist comes rushing in because a "new" asteroid has been detected and is on a collision course with Earth. What happens next? The answer depends on several factors: how big is the asteroid, what is it made of, and how soon is the impact? (That's simplified but roll with it.) NASA's DART mission showed that an impact...

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 take the time to answer your questions about our program on the Unistellar community page and discuss s...

Nearly 40 years ago, on November 20, 1984, the SETI Institute was incorporated with inaugural officers CEO Thomas Pierson and SETI scientist Jill Tarter. The goal was to provide SETI researchers with a place to grow the search for life beyond Earth. What began with one NASA-funded SETI project and two people has since grown to include over 100 researchers and various scientific areas of study, all...

OSIRIS-REx and the Hayabusa spacecraft have sample asteroids to understand what they're made of. NASA sent the DART mission to change the orbit of a tiny asteroid orbiting another asteroid. ESA sent Hera as a follow-up mission to see what the impactor did. All of these missions have been done in the name of planetary defense -- protecting Earth from the worst of the rocks in space. While none of t...