Astronomers Detect a Possible Signature of Life on a Distant Planet

The detection of dimethyl sulfide on an exoplanet is an exciting development, ok. And DMS on Earth is almost entirely biologically sourced, but that doesn’t make it an exclusive biosignature. There are plausible abiotic pathways for DMS formation, such as in geochemistry we can’t know entirely about because we live on earth.

I’m not sure a journalist for this exalted American newspaper here knows anything about this and frankly the excited language of this article is dumb af. Probably because excited people keep paying for subscriptions to this trash.

It took my amateur self nearly 10 mins to ask around to qualified friends and research some counter ideas.

You could have just read to the end of the article and avoided wasting the time of your "qualified" friends:

> Other researchers emphasized that much research remained to be done. One question yet to be resolved is whether K2-18b is in fact a habitable, Hycean world as Dr. Madhusudhan’s team claims.

> In a paper posted online Sunday, Dr. Glein and his colleagues argued that K2-18b could instead be a massive hunk of rock with a magma ocean and a thick, scorching hydrogen atmosphere — hardly conducive to life as we know it.

> Scientists will also need to run laboratory experiments to make sense of the new study — to recreate the possible conditions on sub-Neptunes, for instance, to see whether dimethyl sulfide behaves there as it does on Earth.

> “It’s important to remember that we’re just starting to understand the nature of these exotic worlds,” said Matthew Nixon, a planetary scientist at the University of Maryland who was not involved in the new study.