
-Advancing the search for weird life on weird planets
Scientists have identified a promising new way to detect life on faraway planets, hinging on worlds that look nothing like Earth and gases rarely considered in the search for extraterrestrials.
In a new Astrophysical Journal Letters paper, researchers from the University of California, Riverside, describe these gases, which could be detected in the atmospheres of exoplanets – planets outside our solar system – with the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST.
Called methyl halides, the gases comprise a methyl group, which bears a carbon and three hydrogen atoms, attached to a halogen atom such as chlo...
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