Radmila Topalovic
Since I was a little girl I’ve wondered about the Moon and stars, how long would it take me to get there? What would I find when I arrived? Should I bring warm clothes or shorts and sandals?
During the Spring and early Summer months I look for the zodiacal constellation Leo (the Lion), you can catch it just after sunset in the west at midsummer. I love Leo as it’s so easy to find, look for a backwards question mark (the head of the lion). The constellation has existed for at least 6000 years, known to the Sumerians, Babylonians (who called it the Great Lion), Egyptians and the Greeks. For the ancient Egyptians Leo was of special significance, the Sun passing through Leo marked the annual flooding of the Nile and consequently the growth of crops.
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The constellation Leo on the ceiling of the tomb of Pharaoh Seti I in the Valley of the Kings, Egypt, around 1200 BC. By Jean-Pierre Dalbéra - Plafond astronomique (détail) de la tombe de Sethi 1er (Egypte), CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93355482
In the direction of Leo lies a red dwarf star cooler than the Sun with the unimaginative name of K2-18, it hosts an orbiting planet, K2-18b (I’m calling it Vera), first detected by the Kepler Space Telescope ten years ago. Scientists are excited about Vera due to its position in the so-called Goldilocks zone, a region around a star where the temperature could be just right for planets to hold liquid water. If there is water, there may be life of some kind. Brilliant, how do we get there? Well if you were to send a text message to this far-away world it would take 124 years to get there, if we were to set our GPS and travel there the journey would take more than 2 million years, assuming of course no traffic and service station stops.
The atmosphere of Vera has been forensically analysed by a team at the University of Cambridge using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). They announced the tentative discovery of two molecules called dimethyl sulphide (DMS) and dimethyl disulphide (DMDS) - no, I'd never heard of them either. Apparently these molecules are released by marine algae on Earth and could be the chemical fingerprints of life.
I've been waiting my whole life to see the first ever signs of life beyond the Earth, however I couldn't fully believe these results. The probability that the data is not what it seems is 0.3%, this may seem small however it leaves room for questions. Are they really a much hoped for biosignature? Further investigations are required so the big search continues.
Our Sun is one star of up to 400 billion in our Milky Way galaxy. Imagine hundreds of billions of planets or more, imagine also all the moons, some of which could hold water. If this isn't enough to melt your brain, think about the rest of the Universe, there could be up to a trillion galaxies - this number has a whopping twelve zeros in it. There are more stars than there are grains of sand on Earth. I don't believe our planet is the only place in the cosmos harbouring life. It is only a matter of time before we discover life beyond the Earth with the JWST and upcoming telescopes and probes. I don't think we're alone now.
Looking into the Milky Way. ESO La Silla Observatory, Atacama Desert, Chile. ESO/H. Dahle, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons