Seth Shostak (born July 20, 1943) is an American astronomer, currently Senior Astronomer and Director, Center for SETI research. Read full biography of Seth Shostak →
On Mars, where the air is spare - a hundred times less dense than on Earth - someone could hear you scream. But you'd have to really strain to... →
Scientists - who prefer explanations subject to laboratory tests - figure that everything we see today was as inevitable as wrinkles, once the Big... →
Some pundits have proposed that the aliens have come here to breed with us. Apparently, too much bike riding or something similar has rendered them... →
The bottom line is that finding orphan planets - small, faint, and located who-knows-where - is not for the faint of heart. The task is comparable to... →
The bottom line is that the position of the Sun relative to the stars slowly changes for any given date, and over the course of 26,000 years, it can... →
The bottom line is, like, one in five stars has at least one planet where life might spring up. That's a fantastically large percentage. That... →
The central region of the Milky Way, known as the bulge, is stuffed with literally tens of billions of stars. And most of these are old -... →
The era during which only governments could put hardware on the Moon is coming to an end. There are 26 private teams competing for the $30 million... →
The fact that we can't easily foresee clues that would betray an intelligence a million millennia farther down the road suggests that we're... →
The Moon stabilizes Earth's obliquity. Well, almost. The tilt actually varies between 22 and 24.5 degrees - and the variation is enough to induce... →
The overwhelming bulk of the cosmos is deathly quiet. But here and there - on worlds where matter is thick and conditions are right - noises are... →
The split between religion and science is relatively new. Isaac Newton, who first worked out the laws by which gravity held the planets and even the... →
The thing to keep in mind is that we're still in the very early days when it comes to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Saying... →
Seth Shostak (born July 20, 1943) is an American astronomer, currently Senior Astronomer and Director, Center for SETI research.