Dozens of potentially habitable planets have been discovered outside our solar system, and many more are awaiting detection. Is anybody — or anything — there? The hunt for life in these places, which are impossible to visit in person, will begin with a search for biological products in their atmospheres. These atmospheric fingerprints of life...

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) launched on April 18 from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, rising off the pad aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 3:51 p.m. PDT and deploying into Earth’s orbit 49 minutes later. Stephen Kane, an associate professor of planetary astrophysics at UC Riverside and a Guest Investigator on...