newmou [he/him]

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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2020

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  • The cool thing about this situation is that 1) even though the star is a red dwarf, K2-18b is within its relative goldilocks zone, which would provide the right conditions for life as we know it. 2) Scientists detected carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere a few years ago, which is cool but not a revolutionary thing. But now they’ve detected a LOT of molecules only produced by living organisms (that we know of), mainly phytoplankton, which would be the first detection of its kind in that amount and is a revolutionary thing. 3) Their confidence in the data is 99.7%, and they’re releasing the data to the community in a few days for people to verify. Like, unless there’s some crazy way for these molecules to be created that defies our current understanding of all of biology, there are living organisms on that planet