PREMIUM
The gas signatures Madhusudhan and his team at Cambridge have detected are the surest signs of life outside Earth that humanity has ever encountered. How we interpret and build on this data, from 124 light years away, will be crucial, he says.
A graph shows the observed transmission spectrum of the habitable zone exoplanet K2-18 b using the James Webb Space Telescope MIRI spectrograph instrument. The vertical shows the fraction of star light absorbed in the planet's atmosphere due to molecules in its atmosphere. The data are shown in the yellow circles with the 1-sigma uncertainties. The curves show the model fits to the data, with the black curve showing the median fit and the cyan curves outlining the 1-sigma intervals of the model fits. The absorption features attributed to dimethyl sulphide and dimethyl disulphide are indicated by the horizontal lines and text. The image behind the graph is an illustration of a hycean planet orbiting a red dwarf star. This image was obtained by Reuters on April 16, 2025. A. Smith, N. Madhusudhan/University of Cambridge/Handout via REUTERS NO RESALES. NO ARCHIVES. THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY.
This handout picture provided by NASA on January 31, 2025 shows asteroid 2024 YR4 as observed by the Magdalena Ridge 2.4m telescope at the New Mexico Institute of Technology on January 27, 2025.
