FORBES - Media outlets widely reported last fall that a possible sign of life had been found on another planet. The evidence came from the James Webb Space Telescope, which identified the presence of a molecule called dimethyl sulfide on an exoplanet called K2-18b.
On Earth, DMS is produced by phytoplankton in the oceans.
Evidence Of Life?
Did NASA discover evidence of life elsewhere in the cosmos? Not likely, argues a new study published this week in Astrophysical Journal Letters. It claims that there is no DMS around K2-18b and that the detection published last fall was incorrect.
“This planet gets almost the same amount of solar radiation as Earth. And if the atmosphere is removed as a factor, K2-18b has a temperature close to Earth’s, which is also an ideal situation in which to find life,” said Shang-Min Tsai, the paper's author and a project scientist at the University of California, Riverside.