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A few months ago, Nextbigfuture reported that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observed a planet, K2-18, showing the presence of chemicals that indicate possible life. The carbon-bearing molecules including methane and carbon dioxide. Webb’s discovery adds to recent studies suggesting that K2-18 could be a Hycean exoplanet, one which has the potential to possess a hydrogen-rich atmosphere and a water ocean-covered surface.
These findings, including low ammonia, suggest an ocean under a hydrogen-rich atmosphere on K2-18, an exoplanet 8.6 times Earth’s mass, orbiting the dwarf star K2-18 in the habitable zone, 120 light-years away.
JWST has detected signs of methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of K2-18. It’s a discovery that could help reshape the way we think about the search for life beyond Earth, and take our understanding of sub-Neptunes to the next level.
In 2021, an international collaboration led by Nikku Madhusudhan at the University of Cambridge to use JWST to take another peak at K2-18. Their team detected something extraordinary, methane, carbon dioxide, and potentially dimethyl sulfide, a compound that’s primarily created on Earth by living creatures. Now don’t get too excited. We’re not saying that there’s life there.
There needs to be more observations to absolutely confirm dimethyl sulfide AND they must eliminate non-life pathways that this could happen.
A few decades ago, we were just beginning to find exoplanets. We were doing it one transit at a time. The Kepler, and TESS, and all of these other telescopes start working and now there are over 5,500 exoplanets. Now we can look at their atmospheres and see clearly what’s going on with them, all this distance away.
We really need 16 JWSTs to follow up on all of the things that need closer observation.
Sub-Neptunes are the most common type of world that we have detected in our galaxy. Is that a consequence of our detection methods, or is it actually the case that it’s the most common type of world?
Nextbigfuture believes it is a consequence of not having good telescopes to find the smaller worlds.
Most exoplanets have been discovered with the transit technique.
We know that there’s a lot of methane in the atmosphere of K2-18. We see a lot of methane or we see a lot of methane absorption and strong detection there. But the fact that the JWST data basically didn’t find strong evidence of water in the atmosphere, that could indicate a couple things. It could indicate that maybe there is no ocean, there’s no water evaporating on a regular cycle, or maybe the ocean is not water. It could be something else. So those are a couple factors. Or maybe the ocean is frozen solid, and it’s also not evaporating into the atmosphere, and you’re having a lot of water transition and a water cycle like we do here on Earth. So it could mean there’s no ocean,