A new study from NAI’s NASA Goddard Space Flight Center team and their colleagues used the Keck II telescope in Hawai’i to observe the exoplanet HD189733b. The team attempted to confirm prior observations of a remarkably bright methane emission from the planet, but new high-resolution data and models exclude an astrophysical source for the observation. They conclude instead that the signal most closely matches the signature of water vapor from the Earth’s atmosphere, and the previous detection is most likely a data reduction artifact. Their paper appears in a recent issue of the Astrophysical Journal.