Data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has shown that an exoplanet around a star in the constellation Leo has some of the chemical markers that, on Earth, are associated with living organisms. But these are vague indications. So how likely is it that this exoplanet harbors alien life?
Imagine it as looking at a light bulb through a glass tumbler. You can see through it perfectly when empty. If you fill it with water, you can still see through pretty well, but there are some optical effects and coloration, which are the equivalent of hydrogen and dust clouds in space. Now imagine you poured in red food dye—this might be the equivalent of the main chemical constituent in a planet's atmosphere.
But most atmospheres are made up of many chemicals. The equivalent of looking for any one of them would be like pouring 50—likely many more—colored food dyes, in different amounts, into your tumbler and trying to identify how much of one particular color is present. It is an incredibly difficult task with plenty of room for subjective assessment and errors.
The chemical composition of K2-18b’s atmosphere. Credit: NASA, CSA, ESA, R. Crawford , J. Olmsted , Science: N. Madhusudhan However, this finding was later successfully refuted by . If there can be confusion about what is in the atmosphere of a planet that's just next door, in astronomical terms, it's easy to see why analyzing a planet that's many times further away is a difficult task.K2-18b are low but not impossible. These results will likely not change anybody's opinions or beliefs about extraterrestrial life. Instead, they do demonstrate the advancing ability to look into worlds that are not our own and find more information.
Studying the atmospheres of gas giant exoplanets can inform the study of similar worlds in the solar system, such as Jupiter and Saturn. And identifying levels of COindicates how an extreme greenhouse effect might affect a planet. This is the real power of studying the composition of planetary atmospheres.
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