As long as a white dwarf star is alive, life will likely not survive.

New research sheds light on the possibility of life emerging on planets orbiting white dwarf stars.

Arms20210720.

When a star is born, the leftover dust and gas in the cloud from which it formed doesn’t just sit there. It clumps together, forming other cosmic objects — asteroids and comets and meteors and, yes, exoplanets. We’ve detected many of these exoplanets in orbit around alien stars in the Milky Way.

But not all exoplanets stay put. Some get gravitationally kicked away from their parent star, to wander the galaxy, cold and alone. These are less easy to detect — but, after careful combing through data from NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope, astronomers think they’ve found some.

In data from a two-month observing period, they counted 27 signals hinting that a rogue exoplanet was moving past the telescope’s eye. Most of them were known, detected by other instruments — but five were completely new.

In the latest addition to the phosphine on Venus debate, a team of scientists suggests the phosphine is a result of volcanic activity.

If there’s alien life nearby, where are we most likely to find it?

From nearby planets like Venus and Mars, to distant moons like Europa and Titan, these are worlds where we’re most likely to find alien life.

Detecting ‘technosignatures’ such as hypothetical Dyson spheres in space could lead us to extraterrestrial life, and now NASA is funding the search.