NPR - An ocean world that's teeming with microbes — and who knows what other kinds of life — is currently the best explanation for some chemical signatures that the James Webb Space Telescope has spotted in the atmosphere of a distant planet.
That's according to Nikku Madhusudhan of the University of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy, who called his team's new findings "astounding."
"These are the first hints we are seeing of an alien world that is possibly inhabited," he told reporters in a press briefing. "This is a revolutionary moment."
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Edward Schwieterman, an astrobiologist at the University of California, Riverside who wasn't part of the research team that worked on these new results from K2-18b, says that to him this detection seems "tentative."
"It is not a sure thing," he says. And while he thinks the researchers were right to report it, he also thinks it would not be surprising "if the signal went away" when other groups reanalyzed the data.