Exoplanet with strong signs of biological life.

It all starts with a CNBC interview broadcast in the first week of 2024, a few days ago, in that interview British astronaut Tim Peake was asked to speculate about extraterrestrial life and the astronaut said that it is potentially possible that the James Space Telescope website has already found extraterrestrial life, he also said it's just that we don't want to publish or confirm these results until we are completely sure, but we have found a planet that appears to be emitting strong signals of biological life.

This is what he said verbatim and from other statements it seems that this exoplanet is k2-18b, this is a world 8.6 times more massive than the Earth, it is located 120 light years from our solar system and here is the thing, is that This is not a new discovery, this planet was studied by Hubble and now it has been studied by James Webb and it is a very interesting world because apparently it is an ocean planet, that is, a planet that would not have a solid surface, which would be It would be completely covered by water.

The closest example in science fiction is the planet Kamino from the Star Wars saga, it would be something like that, in 2019 we had the Hubble data and now we have the James web research and as I say, yes it is a very interesting world but it is That information is also not secret, the information that the James web has captured is not secret, it is not being hidden by NASA, it was made public a few months ago in 2023.

How does Jam Webb do these things? It can actually capture life on another world. It does this indirectly. It can characterize the atmosphere of exoplanets. To do this, what it does is capture the light of the star that passes through the atmosphere of the planet. that exoplanet and analyze the spectrum of that light to find out what types of gases it contains.

Each atmosphere is a cocktail of gases, ours for example is basically composed of 78% nitrogen and almost 21% oxygen and yes when we breathe most of what we put in our lungs is nitrogen but we only capture the oxygen to live nitrogen, it is a noble gas, it does not interact with our body and is not dangerous for us.

The composition of the Earth's atmosphere is very strange, in fact, almost all scientists affirm that it is like this because it is a product of life, the other two rocky worlds with an atmosphere that we have in the solar system, which are Venus and Mars, have a completely different position, the fundamental component is carbon dioxide and they have almost no oxygen and it seems that this is the general trend of the rocky planets that we are finding in the cosmos.

And the Earth in its origins also had an atmosphere loaded with carbon dioxide, but it is believed that it was the activity of living beings that ended up transforming it, so if we discover an exoplanet with a combination of gases similar to that of the earth we could thus affirm that perhaps it had life, although we could not affirm it 100%.

What we can affirm 100% is that having an atmosphere like ours and if it also has adequate temperatures, even if life does not exist, it would be a world where humans could walk and breathe and live, but the chemical signature of life that It is what is called the combination of gases that a planet with life should have and that is a product of biological activity is much more complex, it is more complex than having nitrogen and oxygen, there are other elements that would bring us closer to that 100% security.

James Webb may have detected one of them, the answer is that he is working on it right now, we must confirm the data, we must try to look for some more element in addition to this dimethyl sulfide, it is a compound that smells like cooked cabbage and like I told you in the video it is a compound that emits phytoplakton from the Earth's oceans as part of its metabolic process, there is phytoplankton or something similar to plankton in k2-18b because at the moment it is a possibility.

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