Astronomers have discovered that sulfur could be the key to helping us narrow down our search for life on other planets.
It's not like sulfur is a big indicator that a planet is inhabited.
Instead, it's the opposite: significant amounts of sulfur dioxide in a planet's atmosphere is a sign that the world is uninhabitable.
One of the "goals" of modern astronomy is to find life on another planet.
But this is an extremely daunting task.
The James Webb Space Telescope is unlikely to be able to identify biosignatures - atmospheric gases produced by life - on any nearby planets.
But one way to narrow down the list of potentially habitable planets is by the concentration of water vapor, writes yahoonews, the Telegraph reports.
It is known that if a planet has a lot of water vapor, it may also have a good chance of hosting life.
But even searching for water has difficulties.
In a recent paper, astronomers note that they have found a different gas that could be a useful tool for separating uninhabitable worlds from potentially habitable ones: sulfur dioxide.
It is reported that warm, humid worlds like Earth have very little sulfur dioxide in their atmospheres.
This is because rain can pick up atmospheric sulfur dioxide and disperse it into the oceans or onto land, essentially cleaning it from the atmosphere.
And, ironically, planets like Venus also have very little sulfur dioxide.
In the case of that planet, high amounts of ultraviolet radiation from the sun catalyze reactions that convert sulfur dioxide to hydrogen sulfide in the upper atmosphere.
There is still a lot of sulfur dioxide, but it tends to descend into the lower atmosphere, where it cannot be detected.
Otherwise, the new sulfur dioxide-based technique can't tell us which planets might have life, but they do tell us which planets probably don't. /Telegraph/
