Svetlana Berdyugina

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.

Light from the Sun is usually unpolarized: its waves oscillate in all directions, like a crowd where everyone waves their arms as they please. But on May 3, 2023, astronomers in Locarno, Switzerland, noticed that during a flare, the light from helium became organized — the waves aligned in one direction, like soldiers on parade.