Searching for K-9 — a canine inquiry

Anther dog-blog by Juno, who lives with her humans in Summerland B.C., Canada. This five-and-a-half-year-old Labradoodle is an internationally celebrated dog blogger. Today she turns her attention to the intriguing world of Astro-physics.

“It’s not every day that astronomers detect a possible Signature of Life on a distant planet.”

Writing in the New York Times on April 16, 2025 Carl Zimmer describes an amazing discovery.

“Now a team of researchers is offering what it contends is the strongest indication yet of extraterrestrial life, not in our solar system but on a massive planet, known as K2-18b, that orbits a star 120 light-years from Earth.”

Now that’s a long way from earth, the space where I keep my nose to the ground, occasionally looking skyward when someone throws my ball the full length of the dog park.

With new telescopic technology we can see further out into space as never before — Papaw has written about our local radio telescope facility near us — There’s more out there than country music stars and oligarchical spouses celebrating their husband’s technological prowess.

“A repeated analysis of the exoplanet’s atmosphere suggests an abundance of a molecule that on Earth has only one known source: living organisms such as marine algae.”

It seems that “the best explanation for [the] group’s observations is that K2-18b is covered with a warm ocean, brimming with life . . . It’s the first time humanity has seen potential biosignatures on a habitable planet.”

Well this is big news! To think that K2-18b holds the promise that life as we know it might exist elsewhere. There are doodles everywhere it seems, even out there. One does wonder about K2-18a though no explanation appears in today’s announcement.

The discovery has me thinking that there may be a planet K-9 out there somewhere. I am pawsative it’s out there somewhere. If humans wish to find hints of their own existence elsewhere, I can do the same for canines everywhere. Dogs are more engaged with astrophysics than many realize. A funny children’s rhyme (attributed to Mother Goose) chimes:

Hey, diddle, diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon;
The little dog laughed
To see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.

“The little dog laughed.” Well I just discovered the “dog” star. We see it in the sky on clear nights. Dog is the nickname for the star Sirius. Seriously! Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky . . . a binary star consisting of a main-sequence star of spectral type A0 or A1, termed Sirius A, and a faint white dwarf companion of spectral type DA2, termed Sirius B.

So why Sirius is nicknamed Dog? Well Astro was George Jetson’s dog and Pluto remains a staple in the Walt Disney character stable. You could say that dogs are synonymous with astronomical discovery.

So again, I ask; what about K-9? It’s out there; I know it; I can feel it in my bones. As the good book says: “Seek and ye shall find” (Matthew 7:7); and “you will search from planet to star” (Amos 8:12, adapted). As they say over at NIKE, Just do it. Woof.