'High-res' is the secret to finding alien life with the next great space telescope

We're still in the definition phase of the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), but it seems like every week a new research group comes out with a paper helping to shape what is becoming one of the most important space telescopes of the 2040s.

A new paper posted to the arXiv preprint server from a team of researchers led by Daniel Jaffe of the University of Texas at Austin contributes to this ongoing definition work by arguing that it's time HWO adopted a high-resolution near-IR spectroscopy capability—which sounds great in practice, but so far hasn't been attempted because of technological limitations.

But, according to the paper, two recent inventions finally make a working version of an extremely high-resolution exoplanet hunter viable. ...