Guest post: does atmospheric chemistry suggest there’s life on another planet?

Today we have a guest post from reader Coel Hellier, who does this kind of stuff for a living. His text deals with the recent kerfuffle about whether a nearby planet shows an atmospheric gas indicative of life.  I particularly like the details about how scientists go about analyzing a question like this. His text is indented, and he’s added the illustrations.

Is the dimethyl sulphide in the atmosphere of exoplanet K2-18b real?

Everyone is interested in whether there is life on other planets. Thus the recent claim of a detection of a biomarker molecule in the atmosphere of an exoplanet has attracted both widespread attention and some skepticism from other scientists.

The claim is that planet K2-18b, 124 light years from Earth, shows evidence of dimethyl sulfide (DMS), a molecule that on Earth arises from biological activity. Below is an account of the claim; I try to include more science than the does mainstream media, but do so largely with pictures in the hope that the non-expert can follow the argument.

Transiting exoplanets such as K2-18b are discovered owing to the periodic dips they cause in the light of the host star:

And here is the lightcurve of K2-18b, as observed by the James Webb Space Telescope, showing the transit that led to the claim of DMS by Madhusudhan et al.:

If we know the size of the star (deduced from knowing the type of star from its spectrum), the fraction of light that is blocked then tells you the size of the planet.

But we also need to know its mass. One gets that from measuring how much the host star is tugged around by the planet’s gravity, and that is obtained from the Doppler shift of the star’s light.

The black wiggly line in the plot below is the periodic motion of the star caused by the orbiting planet. Quantifying this is made harder by lots of additional variation in the measurements (blue points with error bars), which is the result of magnetic activity on the star (“star spots”). But nevertheless, if one phases all the data on the planet’s orbital period (lower panel), then one can measure the planet’s mass (plot by Ryan Cloutier et al):

So now we have the mass and the size of the planet (and we also know its surface temperature since we know how far it is from its star, and thus how much heating it gets).  Combining that with some understanding of proto-planetary disks and planet formation. we can thus dervise models of the internal composition and structure of the planet.

The problem is that multiple different internal structures can add up to the same overall mass and radius. One has flexibility to invoke a heavy core (iron, nickel), a rocky mantle (silicates), perhaps a layer of ice (methane?), perhaps a liquid ocean (water?), and also an atmosphere.

This “degeneracy” is why Nikku Madhusudhan can argue that K2-18b is a “hycean” planet (hydrogen atmosphere over a liquid-water ocean) while others argue that it is instead a mini-Neptune, or that it has an ocean of molten magma.

But one can hope to get more information from the detection of molecules in the planet’s atmosphere, a task that is one of the main design goals of the James Webb Space Telescope [JWST]. The basic idea is straightforward: During transit, some of the starlight will shine through the thin smear of atmosphere surrounding the planet, and the different molecules absorb different wavelengths of light in a pattern characteristic of that molecule (figure by ESA):

So one observes the star both during the transit and out of transit, and then subtracts the two, and the result is a spectrum of the planet’s atmosphere.

If the planet is a large gas giant with a fluffy, extended atmosphere and is orbiting a bright star (so that a lot of photons pass through the atmosphere), the results can be readily convincing. For example, here is a spectrum of exoplanet WASP-39b with features from different molecules labelled (figure by Tonmoy Deka et al):

[I include a plot of WASP-39b partly because I was part of the discovery team for the Wide Angle Search for Planets survey, but also because it is pretty amazing that we can now obtain a spectrum like that of the atmosphere of an exoplanet that is 700 light-years away, even while the planet itself is so small and dim and distant that we cannot even see it.]

The problem with K2-18b is that the star is vastly fainter and the planet much smaller than WASP-39b. This is at the limit of what even the $10-billion JWST can do.

When you’re subtracting two very-similar spectra (the in- and out-of-transit spectra)  to look for a rather small signal, any “instrumental systematics” matter a lot. Here is the same spectrum of K2-18b, as processed by several different “data reduction pipelines”, and as you can see the differences between them (effectively, the limits of how well we understand the data processing) are similar in size to the signal (plot by Rafael Luque et al):

The next problem is that there are a lot of different molecules that one could potentially invoke (with the constraint of making the atmospheric chemistry self-consistent). For example, here are the expected spectral features from eight different possible molecules (figure by Madhusudhan):

To finally get to the point, I show is the crucial figure below. Nikku Madhusudhan and colleagues argue — based on an understanding of planet formation, and on arguments that planets like K2-18b are hycean worlds [with a liquid water ocean under a hydrogen-rich atmosphere], and from considerations of atmospheric chemistry, in addition to careful processing and modelling of the spectrum itself — that the JWST spectrum of K2-18b is best interpreted as follows (the blue line is the model, the red error bars are the data):

This interpretation involves large contributions from DMS (dimethyl sulphide) and also DMDS (dimethyl disulphide) — the plot below shows the different contributions separated — and if so that would be notable, since on Earth those compounds are products of biological activity—mainly from algae.

In contrast, Jake Taylor analysed the same spectrum and argues that he can fit it adequately with a straight line, and that the spectral features are not statistically significant. Others point out that the fitted model contains roughly as many free parameters as data points. Meanwhile, a team led by Rafael Luque reports that they can fit the spectrum without invoking DMS or DMDS, and suggest that observations of another 25 transits of K2-18b would be needed to properly settle the matter.

There are several distinct questions here: Are the details of the data processing sufficiently understood? (perhaps, but not certainly); are the relevant spectral features statistically significant? (that’s borderline);  and, if the features are indeed real, are they properly interpreted as DMS? (theorists can usually think of alternative possibilities). Perhaps a fourth question is whether there are abiotic mechanisms for producing DMS.

This is science at the cutting edge (and Madhusudhan has been among those emphasizing the lack of certainty, though the doubts have not always been in news stories), and so the only real answer to these questions is that things are currently unclear. This is a fast-moving area of astrophysics and we’ll know a lot more in a few years.