Will signs of life on K2-18b be confirmed?

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66786611

Tantalising sign of possible life on faraway world

Nasa's James Webb Telescope may have discovered a molecule thought only to be produced by life.

Will the presence of DMS be confirmed by further study (expected in about a year)?

Note this does not require evidence of life, but would be evidence in support of it!

Further details: https://esawebb.org/news/weic2321/

Update 2025-05-01 (PST): - Follow-up observations were made in April 24, but results have not yet been published. (AI summary of creator comment)

This question is managed and resolved by Manifold.

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I've extended this; whilst I believe follow-up observations were made in April 24, I'm not aware of the results having been published. Please let me know if you see them!

This market is more like

than

predictedYES

@Zardoru yes indeed, and intentionally. Slightly clickbait-y title on my part. There's a large gap for arbitrage but not much liquidity...

predictedNO

I was pretty excited by this, but news media didn't mention that the DMS result is only 1 sigma, so 15% of planets without DMS would look more convincing than K2-18b.

I think this is pretty exciting, since until now, we had basically no idea if simple life was common throughout the universe. Now with JWST this is the first time that we can actually detect biomarkers in exoplanets, so if it is common, we will know soon, and this might just be it. Or you know, maybe life is just rare.

But Prof Madhusudhan described the detection of DMS as tentative and said that more data would be needed to confirm its presence. Those results are expected in a year.

Exciting! Betting NO, but exciting.

Buying NO as insurance, because it would be REALLY cool if it was true.

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