Scientists using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) believe they have found the strongest evidence ever of alien life on a distant exoplanet named K2-18 b. The exoplanet, which was discovered in 2015, appears to have chemicals in its atmosphere that are produced only by living organisms, at least here on Earth.
According to NASA, K2-18 b is a super Earth exoplanet that orbits an M-type star 120 light-years from Earth. Its mass is 8.92 times that of Earth and it takes 32.9 days to complete one orbit of its star.
The scientists state in their research published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters that they have found dimethyl sulfide, or DMS, and dimethyl disulfide, or DMDS, on K2-18 b. Those two chemicals are created on Earth by living organisms, primarily microbial life such as marine phytoplankton, or algae.
“There may be processes that we don’t know about that are producing these molecules,” one of the study’s authors, Nikku Madhusudhan of the University of Cambridge, said. “But I don’t think there is any known process that can explain this without biology.”
While exciting and potentially groundbreaking, the researchers’ claims about discovering evidence of alien life are being met with much skepticism in the scientific community.
“Life is one of the options, but it’s one among many,” Dr. Nora Hanni, a chemist of the Physics Institute at the University of Berne, told The Guardian. “We would have to strictly rule out all the other options before claiming life.”
Making an even stronger dismissal is astrophysicist Ryan MacDonald of the University of Michigan, who told New Scientist, “These new JWST observations do not offer convincing evidence that DMS or DMDS are present in K2-18 b’s atmosphere. We have a boy-who-cried-wolf situation for K2-18 b, where multiple previous three-sigma detections have completely vanished when subject to closer scrutiny. Any claim of life beyond Earth needs to be rigorously checked by other scientists, and unfortunately many previous exciting claims for K2-18 b haven’t withstood these independent checks”
Regardless of whether further study determines if they have found alien life or not, Madhusudhan calls it “a revolutionary moment.”
“This is the strongest evidence to date for a biological activity beyond the solar system. We are very cautious. We have to question ourselves both on whether the signal is real and what it means,” he said, adding, “Decades from now, we may look back at this point in time and recognize it was when the living universe came within reach. This could be the tipping point, where suddenly the fundamental question of whether we’re alone in the universe is one we’re capable of answering.”
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