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A Popular Alien-Hunting Technique Is Increasingly in Doubt
Recent controversies bode ill for the effort to detect life on other planets by analyzing the gases in their atmospheres.
“It’s a bit of this elephant in the room,” said the astronomer Daniel Angerhausen of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, who is a project scientist on the LIFE mission, a proposed space telescope that would search for biosignature gases on Earth-like exoplanets. The researchers who tentatively detected it on K2-18 b interpreted the other gases discovered in its sky to mean that the planet is a “water world” with a habitable surface ocean, supporting their theory that the DMS there comes from marine life. One scenario is that volcanoes release chemical compounds called phosphides, which could react with sulfur dioxide in Venus’ atmosphere to form phosphine—a plausible explanation given that scientists have found evidence of active volcanism on our twin planet.
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