Alien worlds become the focus of this cinematic journey across the Milky Way, using the imaginary ship NAVIS III to explore ...

The Milky Way as a laboratory for civilizations Any attempt to chart alien societies has to start with the structure of The Milky Way itself, a disk roughly 100,000 light years across with hundreds of ...

Small, rocky planets can coalesce around a wide variety of stars, suggesting that Earth-like alien worlds may have formed early and often throughout our Milky Way galaxy's history, a new study reveals ...

Interstellar space is unforgivingly vast, but the emptiness has some advantages. The lack of atmosphere means there is no aerodynamic drag.

NASA’s Roman Space Telescope could revolutionize the search for alien worlds by discovering around 100,000 exoplanets—far ...

As a galactic archaeologist, my job is to reconstruct the past of our galaxy – and read the signs of its future.

If advanced aliens lived on a planet within a few hundred to a thousand light years away from Earth, then vast numbers of their signals must already have crossed Earth without being noticed, a new ...

How Radio Astronomy Helps Us See the Invisible Cosmos," astrophysicist Emma Chapman describes the hidden corners of space that only radio waves can reveal — and makes the case for contacting aliens.

I/ATLAS has caused quite a stir over the last year, inviting astronomers to update what they know about other solar systems ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. An award-winning reporter writing about stargazing and the night sky. When will the Milky Way collide with the Andromeda Galaxy?

On May 22, 2026, the Pentagon released a second batch of previously classified photos and videos showing what appear to be unexplained flying objects. These file dumps were the culmination of a ...