{"id":208617,"date":"2025-03-13T13:24:58","date_gmt":"2025-03-13T18:24:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/signs-of-alien-life-may-be-hiding-in-these-gases"},"modified":"2025-03-13T13:24:58","modified_gmt":"2025-03-13T18:24:58","slug":"signs-of-alien-life-may-be-hiding-in-these-gases","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/signs-of-alien-life-may-be-hiding-in-these-gases","title":{"rendered":"Signs of alien life may be hiding in these gases"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/signs-of-alien-life-may-be-hiding-in-these-gases.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>In a new <i>Astrophysical Journal Letters<\/i> <a href=\"https:\/\/iopscience.iop.org\/article\/10.3847\/2041-8213\/adb558\" target=\"_blank\">paper<\/a>, researchers from the University of California, Riverside, describe these gases, which could be detected in the atmospheres of exoplanets\u2014planets outside our solar system\u2014with the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST.<\/p>\n<p>Called methyl halides, the gases comprise a <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/methyl+group\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">methyl group<\/a>, which bears a carbon and three hydrogen atoms, attached to a halogen atom such as chlorine or bromine. They\u2019re primarily produced on Earth by bacteria, marine algae, fungi, and some plants.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1527,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-208617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alien-life","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208617"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208617\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}