UW doctoral student in Earth and space sciences, Joshua Krissansen-Totton.
Joshua Krissansen-Totton
UW doctoral student in Earth and space sciences, Joshua Krissansen-Totton.

As NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and other new giant telescopes come online they will need novel strategies to look for evidence of life on other planets. A University of Washington study has found a simple approach to look for life that might be more promising than just looking for oxygen.

The paper, published Jan. 24 in Science Advances, offers a new recipe for providing evidence that a distant planet harbors life.

“This idea of looking for atmospheric oxygen as a biosignature has been around for a long time. And it’s a good strategy — it’s very hard to make much oxygen without life,” said corresponding author Joshua Krissansen-Totton, a UW doctoral student in Earth and space sciences. “But we don’t want to put all our eggs in one basket. Even if life is common in the cosmos, we have no idea if it will be life that makes oxygen. The biochemistry of oxygen production is very complex and could be quite rare.”

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