eli5: Today NASA announced it has detected a gas on a planet 120 light years away that might indicate life. How?

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I just can’t compute how this is possible. How can a telescope detect a gas, which isn’t even visible to the naked eye, on a planet that is an incomprehensible distance away.

[Source](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66786611)

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Anonymous 0 Comments

This is possibly a dumb question: If the planets we observe are theoretically in the past, does that mean the elements we observe on the planet are also in the past?

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