In 1938, Orson Welles, perhaps most famous for a sled named Rosebud, accidentally incited panic in radio listeners who tuned into his Halloween Eve retelling of H. G. Wells’ 1898 novel The War of the Worlds. While the number of people who reportedly went into hysteria after hearing the infamous broadcast has been greatly exaggerated over the years, it is true that some believed Grovers Mill, N.J., was under attack by Martian invaders bent on Earth domination. This will most likely never happen. Not because this American classic is a fictional account, but because it is exceedingly unlikely for intelligent life to have developed anywhere near our solar system, let alone twice in the same system at around the same time. But what about unintelligent life? In a constellation far, far away, ~120 light years, in fact, researchers may have found evidence of plant life on planet K2-18b using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Not only is this exciting for obvious reasons, but it may also lend credence to an astronomical theory that researchers should search beyond Earth-like planets for signs of life. Could there be other forms of life in our vast universe? New evidence suggests that on a planet a mere 120 light years away, scientists have found the answer. Courtesy of NASA, CSA, ESA, J. Olmsted (STScI). Nestled in the Leo constellation, K2-18b is a sub-Neptune-size planet orbiting in the habitable zone of a cool dwarf star uninspiringly named K2-18. With a radius 2.6× the size of our very own big blue marble, K2-18b is theorized to be a Hycean world, which is typically characterized by having a large surface ocean covered by an atmosphere of mostly hydrogen. While this is not confirmed, the planet’s Hycean makeup was positive in a spectra examination of its atmosphere, which showed an abundance of methane and carbon dioxide along with a lack of ammonia. But what researchers did not expect to find was a reading for dimethyl sulfide — a compound that, on Earth, is produced only by life. The bulk of Earth’s dimethyl sulfide is produced by phytoplankton in marine environments, which would make sense if K2-18b is indeed confirmed to be a Hycean world … because of, you know, all the water. Normally, it would be difficult to gather chemical data from distant atmospheres independently, due to their host star’s higher brightness. To overcome this, researchers waited until K2-18b was fully eclipsed by its charge, allowing Webb’s instruments to analyze the starlight that passed through K2-18b’s atmosphere. Though it worked the first time, more tests need to be run to ensure that the first readings weren’t a fluke. Plans are in the works to capture future spectra using the spectrograph within the telescope’s mid-infrared instrument. If this is successful, not only will extraterrestrial life be confirmed, but the search for habitable planets will widen to include sub-Neptune water worlds in addition to our more familiar rocky planets. This could also mean that a war of the worlds is more likely to be instigated by hyperintelligent phytoplankton than the more humanoid-looking creatures from Hollywood. The research was published in Astrophysical Journal Letters (www.doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/adc1c8).