Anna Grace Ulses

To spot life on other planets, you don't necessarily need to search for oxygen in the air. Living beings paint the surfaces of their worlds: Earth's plants in green, bacteria in purple. The future HWO space telescope will capture these "paints of life" on exoplanets.

Imagine an artist whose canvas is an entire planet, and whose palette is molecules drinking starlight. His brush is billions of years of evolution, and his painting is a spectral portrait visible even from another star system.