Metals are critical to life. We should screen exoplanets for them

Life is complicated, and not just in a philosophical sense. But one simple thing we know about life is that it requires energy, and to get that energy it needs certain fundamental elements. A new paper published in The Open Journal of Astrophysics by Giovanni Covone and Donato Giovannelli from the University of Naples discusses how we might use that constraint to narrow our search for stars and planets that could potentially harbor life. To put it simply, if it doesn’t have many of the constituent parts of the “building blocks” of life, then life probably doesn’t exist there.