this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
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Nasa's James Webb Space Telescope may have discovered tentative evidence of a sign of life on a faraway planet.Prof Nikku Madhusudhan, of the University of Cambridge, who led the research, told BBC News that his entire team were ''shocked'' when they saw the results.
But they are treating the results with caution, noting that a claim made in 2020 about the presence of another molecule, called phosphine, that could be produced by living organisms in the clouds of Venus was disputed a year later.
Even so, Dr Robert Massey, who is independent of the research and deputy director of the Royal Astronomical Society in London, said he was excited by the results.
Nasa's Hubble telescope had detected the presence of water vapour previously, which is why the planet, which has been named K2-18b, was one of the first to be investigated by the vastly more powerful JWST, but the possibility of an ocean is a big step forward.
This means that these 'sub-Neptunes' are poorly understood, as is the nature their atmospheres, according to Dr Subhajit Sarkar of Cardiff University, who is another member of the analysis team.
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Read the article the bot missed the key point…
It may have detected a molecule called dimethyl sulphide (DMS). On Earth, at least, this is only produced by life.
Thanks for responding with the most important tidbit on the article. Bot needs to do a better summary.