Has Life Just been discovered on a far away planet?

The Chances

After many, MANY years of fruitless searching, scientists might have discovered potential life on a far away planet which has been named K2-18b. To find even a tiny fragment of evidence to suggest that life exists beyond our own planet, is a huge deal if you consider the conditions for a planet to “Potentially” support life. One condition is that the planet must be within the habitable zone of their star (This factor differs from star to star) This means that it must be close enough to not be too cold to kill any trace of life and to be far enough away to not burn the surface into a wasteland. Another variable is that the planet must have a suitable atmosphere, if it’s not thick enough all the “Air” will be expelled into deep space, and too thick means it won’t let in any sunlight, vital for life.

The Planet

The Planet itself seems to be dispersing water vapor indicating that liquid water currently exists on the surface though if life were to exist it would have a hard time living on the surface because it is constantly being bombarded by radiation. The Planet circles a red dwarf star at a 33 day cycle, this gives it the necessary light to both not freeze and to not become a lava written wasteland.

How It Was Found

The planet was discovered in 2015 by the Kepler space telescope and later verified by the Spitzer space telescope. At this point nobody realized that the planet could potentially be supporting life, and just wrote it off as another of the thousands of planets they've found so far. Though after further studies conducted by the JWST some water vapor was detected bringing extreme interest to the area.

Speculations on the planet

The planet itself remains a mystery in its finer details as we cannot get a probe on the surface for now at least, so there is a lot of room for speculation. We have a small amount of evidence pointing towards the planet being mainly consisting of water or in other words an ocean planet. Another interesting point is that the planet seems to be bombarded by incredibly high levels of radiation, so if life does exist it will likely look alot like the Crustaceans or Bugs here on earth, because these two animal groups can survive the longest and highest amount of radiation.