The announcement that the James Webb Space Telescope had detected a possible sign of life on an exoplanet known as K2-18b in the form of “dimethyl sulfide,” (DMS), a gas that is created exclusively by lifeforms on Earth, caused a significant amount of excitement for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration by the month of September.

Now that it has reached this point, the telescope is focusing its whole attention on the ocean-covered globe in the distance. An additional eight-hour-long glance was taken on Friday in order to better study the enticing discoveries, as reported by The Times. This is an exciting milestone in our efforts to investigate what has been termed as one of the most promising known areas to seek for extraterrestrial life.

Call the Plank
There are significant repercussions that will result from the discovery of DMS on the extrasolar planet. According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the gas is “only produced by life” here on Earth, with the majority of it being based on “phytoplankton in marine environments.”

There is no way to know for definite whether or not this is the case on K2-18b. This is especially irritating due to the fact that the exoplanet is situated 124 lightyears away, which makes it extremely difficult to travel there and conduct an investigation in person.

In spite of this, the level of enthusiasm has been constantly increasing. According to the findings of the spectrometer on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), methane and carbon dioxide were discovered to be abundant. This led scientists to the conclusion that the “sub-Neptune” planet was most likely covered in a large ocean that was hundreds of miles deep and had an atmosphere that was rich in hydrogen.

“That right away said you need to have an ocean,” Nikku Madhusudhan, an astrophysicist from Cambridge who is leading the ongoing research, said in an interview with The Times from Cambridge. This is the very first time that we have ever found methane on a planet of this size. The’missing methane problem’ was physically deciphered, which was a riddle that had been going on for more than a decade.
The confirmation of the presence of DMS, on the other hand, might “revolutionize scientific history,” according to his argument.

However, Madhusudhan and his colleagues have a lot of work to do before we can attempt to accomplish that. The team intends to devote the next 10 months to carefully analyzing the findings of the most recent observations made by the James Webb Space Telescope. In accordance with the report, preliminary findings might be disclosed as soon as four to six months from now.

“If we do detect DMS [on K2-18b], it does put it basically at the top for potential signs of habitability,” Madhusudhan said in an interview with the newspaper.