Rival boffins are at odds over a University of Cambridge revelation last week that claimed a planet 124 light years from Earth was 'teeming' with life after they found gas
News Jerry Lawton 16:27, 22 Apr 2025
Ass-tronomers who claim alien farts may have finally led them to ET could be full of hot air, rival boffins say.
Last week University of Cambridge experts claimed the presence of dimethyl sulfide – aka DMS – on K2-18b made them "99.7%" sure the planet 124 light years from Earth is teeming with alien life.
Because DMS is almost exclusively produced by living beings on Earth – it is among the gases humans produce that make guffs smell – astronomers consider it a potential "biosignature" in the search for extraterrestrial life elsewhere in the Universe.
They announced they were confident they had finally found aliens – even if they may be no bigger than bacteria.
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But rivals are kicking up a stink claiming the test the Brit boffins used was not up to standard and their theory may be blowing in the wind.
The Cambridge uni experts reported their DMS detection with a three-sigma statistical significance – indicating a 0.3% chance of it being due to random chance.
Other experts have pointed out that falls short of the typical five-sigma standard required for a scientific discovery to minimise false positives.
That standard translates to a 0.00003% chance the findings are due to a statistical fluke.
Critics have also claimed the data gathered for the study pushed the ability of the James Webb Space Telescope – used to detect the trumps – to its limits.
They said the researchers might have used a biased model that artificially inflated the significance of DMS wafting in K2-18b’s atmosphere.
Manasvi Lingam, an astrobiologist at the Florida Institute of Technology, US, who was not involved in the new research, said: "Concluding that DMS has been detected appears to be premature."
He accepted the latest research "involves new data" but until it had been "analysed independently by others" he said "we cannot make any claims about K2-18b's habitability and the possible existence of life".
Eddie Schwieterman, an assistant professor of astrobiology at the University of California, Riverside, US, who was also not involved in the new research, said he was surprised ethane was not found alongside the possible DMS. He said the host star's UV radiation should break down the molecules and form abundant ethane as a by-product.
Ethane’s absence in the data does not align with scientists' understanding of planetary atmospheres, he added.
"Either our models are in error or the DMS might not exist," he said. "Finding life outside the Solar System won't be a 'one and done' detection.
"Along the way we should expect some false alarms and this may be one." Christopher Glein, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Texas, US, told Space.com his reaction to the study was one of "interest but restraint".
"We need to resist the temptation to find a smoking gun,’’ he said. "The search for life is hard.
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"For a convincing case to be made multiple self-consistent lines of evidence will need to be assembled.
"Did they find a needle in the haystack, or just a sharp piece of hay?"
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