See
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66786611
Will the presence of DMS be confirmed by further study (expected in about a year)?
Note this does not require evidence of life, but would be evidence in support of it!
Further details: https://esawebb.org/news/weic2321/
Update 2025-05-01 (PST): - Follow-up observations were made in April 24, but results have not yet been published. (AI summary of creator comment)
1,000
3.00I've extended this; whilst I believe follow-up observations were made in April 24, I'm not aware of the results having been published. Please let me know if you see them!
I was pretty excited by this, but news media didn't mention that the DMS result is only 1 sigma, so 15% of planets without DMS would look more convincing than K2-18b.
I think this is pretty exciting, since until now, we had basically no idea if simple life was common throughout the universe. Now with JWST this is the first time that we can actually detect biomarkers in exoplanets, so if it is common, we will know soon, and this might just be it. Or you know, maybe life is just rare.
But Prof Madhusudhan described the detection of DMS as tentative and said that more data would be needed to confirm its presence. Those results are expected in a year.
Exciting! Betting NO, but exciting.
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