Scientist Says Sign of "Teeming" Alien Life Caused Him "Shock"

Scientists have found the most compelling evidence to date of extraterrestrial life — and apparently the discovery was a lot to process, even for the researchers behind the finding. As NPR reports, Cambridge University astronomer Nikku Madhusudhan described the human impact of finding, along with his fellow researchers, strong biosignatures — possible signs of life, basically — when pointing the James Webb Space Telescope at the exoplanet K2-18b. "This is a question humanity has been asking for thousands of years, and if you're witnessing it for the first time, it is a shock to the system," Madhusudhan said during a press briefing announcing the discovery. "And it takes a while to recover from that, from the enormity of it." In a new paper published this week in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, the astronomer and his international group of colleagues described the technical work that went into finding chemical signatures of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) — a ... Read full article.