Indian-British astrophysicist Dr Nikku Madhusudhan and his team at Cambridge University have identified potential signs of alien life on a distant planet called K2-18b. With the help of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the team detected the presence of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) gases, which are particularly noteworthy as these are produced by the marine algae present in the ocean.
Who is Dr Nikku Madhusudhan?
Born in 1980 in India, Dr Madhusudhan earned his B.Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, BHU, Varanasi. Later, he pursued his master’s as well as a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 2009, his PhD thesis was about studying the atmospheres of planets outside our solar system, called extrasolar planets.
