Off Topic Scientists MIGHT have just found alien life

[Geoffrey Taucer]

Scientists find promising hints of life on distant planet K2-18b

Scientists find new but tentative evidence that a faraway world orbiting another star may be home to life.

www.bbc.com

Emphasis on "MIGHT;" they still need to recheck, gather further data, confirm findings, eliminate other plausible explanations, etc. But the findings so far seem pretty compelling.

For those who don't feel like reading: the James Webb Space Telescope appears to have discovered signs of an enormous amount of dimethyl sulfide in the atmosphere of a planet roughly 124 lightyears away. On Earth, dimethyl sulfide is created by bacteria and plankton, and there is no currently-known way for it to form without a biological origin.
Which means that with current scientific knowledge, the most plausible explanation for these findings (assuming they hold up to scrutiny) is that the planet K2-18b is teeming with microbial life.

I'm usually the first to complain about media exaggerating the significance of findings in astronomy and physics, but this has me genuinely excited. If these findings hold up, this could be the biggest scientific discovery in human history.

 

[Flicfliclay]

For some reason i thought it was going to be a shot of Katy Perry! ha ha

 

[Dahlialover]

Thanks for sharing this! I’m currently taking a break from most news and social media and so I’m cut off from my usual sources of interesting science news. This is cool!