WASHINGTON DC – NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has detected potential traces of dimethyl sulfide, a chemical only known to be created by phytoplankton on Earth, in the atmosphere of an exoplanet believed to have its own liquid ocean.
Earlier this week, Live Science reported that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) could likely detect signs of extraterrestrial life on an Earth-like planet up to 50 light-years away
Now, a new study reveals that the state-of-the-art spacecraft may have already spotted one such hint of life — “alien farts” — in the atmosphere of a potentially ocean-covered “Goldilocks” world more than twice as far away.
The exoplanet in question, K2-18 b, is a sub-Neptune planet (between the size of Earth and Neptune) that orbits in the habitable zone around a red dwarf star roughly 120 light-years from the sun. K2-18 b, which is around 8.6 times more massive than our planet and around 2.6 times as wide, was first discovered by NASA’s Kepler telescope in 2015. And in 2018, NASA’s Hubble telescope discovered water in the exoplanet’s atmosphere.
In the new study, which was uploaded to the pre-print server arXiv on Sept. 11 (and will be published in a forthcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters), researchers used JWST to further analyze light that had passed through K2-18 b’s atmosphere.
The resulting atmospheric spectrum, which is the most detailed of its kind ever to be captured from a habitable sub-Neptune planet, shows that the exoplanet’s atmosphere contains large amounts of hydrogen, methane and carbon dioxide, and low levels of ammonia. Those chemical markers suggest that K2-18 b could be a hycean world — an exoplanet with a hydrogen-rich atmosphere and a water ocean covering an icy mantle.
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