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 ...

Our search for technosignatures—clear signs of advanced civilizations beyond Earth—takes many forms. Many are driven by the famous Drake equation, which attempts to estimate how many technological ...

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 ...

A NASA astrophysicist has recently proposed a theory that could potentially resolve the long-standing Fermi Paradox. The theory suggests that alien civilizations may be scattered sparsely throughout ...

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 ...

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?

Get ready, stargazers: The Milky Way could be coming to a sky near you. Our galaxy is positively teeming with billions of stars that become bright and vibrant in the cosmos at certain times of the ...

"Milky Way season," when our galaxy's bright center is most visible, is now beginning in the Northern Hemisphere. The best time to see the Milky Way in the U.S. is generally from March to September.