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Science Paper Book Club, May 5: Signs of life on another planet?
🕑 Added 2025-04-25 22:45:01 +0000 UTCBig news for us to chew on, folks! A team of researchers at Cambridge University made headlines around the world last week when they announced the "the strongest evidence yet that life may exist on a planet outside our solar system."
The planet, K2-18b, is 124 light-years away from us, too far to observe directly. So what can their telescope really see? And how confident can we be that the signal they detected really comes from aliens? We'll dig into the methods—and discuss the response from skeptics—in our May session of SPBC.
Science Paper Book Club meets on Monday, May 5th at noon ET. (Click here for your local time).
Here's the paper by Nikku Madhusudhan and colleagues in The Astrophysical Journal Letters (pdf is also attached to this post)
***Click here for the link to the live meeting *** (live access for Howtown Heroes, Council Members, and Mayors. The recording will be posted later for Citizens.)
Note: This paper is pretty technical but don't let that intimidate you. One of our community members with a PhD in astrophysics is going to help guide us through this research (thank you, Marcos!) We suggest reading the Introduction and Discussion sections and/or checking out some of the secondary sources:
Short film from Cambridge featuring lead author Nikku Madhusudhan and the hour-long announcement lecture
Science News: A claimed hint of alien life whips up spirited debate
Plain English podcast: An Astrophysicist Explains the “Most Promising” Sign of Alien Life
Star Talk: Did We Detect Life on an Alien Planet? With David Kippling
New Scientist: Signs of alien life on exoplanet K2-18b may just be statistical noise
Tangentially-related videos from Adam and Joss from a few years back (these were before Howtown but you can probably see the seeds of Howtown sprouting):
If you're not ready to join as a paying member but still want to participate, our Discord server is open to all for further discussion.
See you there!
-Joss & Adam
Comments
Martin Holmström
has the recording been posted?
Joss
Highly recommend this new explainer too! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2eqanZ2YQ8
