Webb finds molecule only made by living things in another world::undefined
Only a 1 sigma confirmation at the moment so needs to be thoroughly reinvestigated
Sigma is basically a representation of certainty that your result isn’t a statistical fluke. It comes from standard deviation in statistics but 1 sigma is 68% certain. 2 sigma is 95%. 3 sigma is 99.7%.
By convention, astronomy uses 3 sigma for “significance,” meaning you almost definitely found something. Particle physics, since it’s usually done in controlled experiments, usually requires 5 sigma (99.99994%).
It’s similar to margin of error in political polls.
Why such different gaps in the metric? Nearly 30% difference between sigmas to less than 5% for the next one.
It’s a number that statistically represents how strong the result is in the data basically. As far as I understand it, with astronomy the typical sigma value expected is 3
Technically, this is astrochemistry, not astronomy. I don’t know what the expected sigma value there is.
By saying 1 sigma, they are basically saying tgat are 68% confident in the results. As you increase the sigma, your confidence in the results increases. Here is a site that goes into more in depth explanation: https://news.mit.edu/2012/explained-sigma-0209#
