Scientists found that we (our body) emit an invisible glow of light, which disappears when we die.

A scientific experiment showed that living things like animals and plants emit a faint glow of light while alive, which disappears after death.

Researchers from the University of Calgary and the National Research Council of Canada studied this using mice and plant leaves. They found clear evidence of this very weak light, called “ultraweak photon emission” (UPE), which seems to stop when an organism dies.

Dan Oblak, the senior author of the study, said, “This really shows that this is not just an imperfection or caused by other biological processes. It’s really something that comes from all living things.”

This glow is not bright or visible to the human eye because it’s extremely faint and easily hidden by other sources of light, like heat or environmental light.

Still, using special cameras that can detect even single photons, the scientists could observe this light in living mice, which dropped noticeably after the mice died. They controlled the temperature to make sure heat wasn’t affecting the results.

The same kind of glow was seen in plant leaves. When the researchers damaged the leaves or exposed them to stress, those parts of the leaf glowed more than the undamaged parts.

This supports the idea that the glow comes from chemical reactions in stressed or active cells, especially from substances called reactive oxygen species.

These findings suggest that this faint light could be a useful tool in medicine or farming, possibly helping doctors or scientists detect stress or illness in animals, humans, or crops without needing to cut them open or do invasive tests.

While the idea may seem a bit strange or even mystical at first since it sounds like talk of auras—it’s based on real physical processes happening in cells. The glow could one day help show how healthy or stressed a living thing is.

You’re glowing” is a well-known complimentary phrase meant to convey a perceived level of health, happiness, or other biological condition—pregnancies often inspire the platitude, for example. But in reality, humans (along with all other living things) truly do emit a glow largely caused by an organism’s metabolic and cellular processes.

The (A) image shows ultraweak photon emissions (UPE) before and after death. The (B) image shows the difference in the photon flux between the two biological states.