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An image of Saturn’s haze-shrouded moon Titan taken by the Cassini spacecraft. The UW-based Virtual Planetary Laboratory studied records of the haze on early Earth to see how such atmospheric conditions might affect an exoplanet, or one beyond our solar system. They found that such a haze might show the world is habitable, or that life itself is present. Credit: NASA

An atmospheric haze around a faraway planet – like the one which probably shrouded and cooled the young Earth – could show that the world is potentially habitable, or even be a sign of life itself. In new research, UW doctoral student Giada Arney and team chose to study Earth in its Archean era 2 ½ billion years back, because it is, as Arney said, “the most alien planet we have geochemical data for.”

The work builds on geol...