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Science
Alex Krause, Research Fellow in Earth System Modelling, UCL

Earth's oxygen has varied dramatically over time – here's how our data could help us spot alien life

NASA

Are we alone in the universe? This is a question that has intrigued humans for centuries and inspired countless studies and works of fiction. But are we getting closer to finding this out? Now that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is in operation, we might have taken one giant leap in being able to answer this one day.

One of the four main objectives of the JWST is to study exoplanets – planets which reside outside of our solar system – and determine what gases their atmospheres are composed of. Now our new research into the variation of oxygen on Earth over geological time has offered clues about what to actually look for.

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