Today researchers are announcing that they have observed a chemical in the atmosphere of Venus that has no right to go there. Chemically, phosphine (one phosphorus atom pertaining to three hydrogens) would be unstable under the conditions seen in Venus’s atmosphere, and there is no clear way for planetary chemistry to make the most of it.
That leads to a lot of speculation about the possibility of somehow having the same probability of life in the upper atmosphere of Venus. But a lot about this work needs the input of people who are not involved in the preliminary study, which today’s publication will ask. There are certain reasons to think that phosphine is present on Venus, while its investigation requires some beautifully involved computer analysis. And there are definitely some creative chemists out there who want to rethink the potential chemistry of our immediate neighbor.
What is phosphine?
Periodically there is a row below the phosphorus nitrogen on the table. And just as nitrogen combines with three hydrogen atoms to form familiar ammonia, phosphorus can bind with three hydrogens to form phosphine. In Earth-like conditions, phosphine is a gas, but not a pleasant one: it is highly toxic and tends to shrink spontaneously in the presence of oxygen. And the feature behind it is that we don’t see much of it today; It is simply unstable in the presence of any oxygen oxygen.
We make some of them for our own use. And some microorganisms that live in oxygen-free environments also produce, although we do not recognize the biochemical process that does this or does not contain enzymes. Still, any phosphine that escapes into the atmosphere quickly escapes into oxygen and is destroyed.
That is not to say that it does not exist on other planets. Gas giants like Jupiter have. But they also have an abundance of hydrogen in the atmosphere and no oxygen, which can withstand chemicals such as phosphine, methane and ammonia. And intense heat and pressure provide conditions near the core of the gas giant in which phosphine forms spontaneously.
We must therefore ensure that there is a clear division between gas giants, hydrogen-rich atmospheres, where phosphine forms, and rocky planets, where the oxidizing environment destroys them. For this reason, people have suggested that phosphine may be the biology we can find in the atmosphere of rocky planets: we know that it was created by life on Earth and are likely to be present on these planets until it changes constantly. No. The way some researchers in the Venus atmosphere pointed to the telescope.
Looking for clues
In particular, researchers turned to the 15-meter James Clark Maxwell Telescope Telescope in Hawaii. JCMT is capable of creating images in wavelengths around one millimeter, which is interesting for the atmosphere of Venus. Venus’s hot low atmosphere produces different radiation in this area of the spectrum. And phosphine is absorbed at a certain wavelength of the field. So if phosphine is present in the upper atmosphere, its presence should create a gap at a specific location in the flood of radiation generated by the lower atmosphere of Venus.
Theoretically, this is an extremely simple observation. In reality, though, it’s a bit of a nightmare, just because the levels are so low. Here on Earth, where we know that phosphine is formed, the stable-state layer in the atmosphere is in the fraction-per-trillion fraction because it is destroyed so quickly. Venus is also moving in comparison to Earth, which means that the location of any signals needs to be adjusted to account for Doppler shifting. Finally, any signal that researchers call “ripples” or will be complicated when parts of the spectrum are reflected somewhere between Venus and the telescope.
This required extensive computer processing of telescope data. But much to the surprise of scientists, this analysis appeared to indicate the presence of phosphine. (In his paper, the researchers write, “The objective was a benchmark for future development, but unexpectedly, our initial observations indicated an investigative amount of Venetian pH.”3 Were present. “) So they repeated the analysis independently. The signal was still there. The researchers also confirmed that their approach was able to find water from the isotope of hydrogen, deuterium, which is present in the atmosphere as we know it. Fri. They also ruled out the possibility that They misidentify the nearby sulfur dioxide absorption line.
By denying obvious problems, they will be able to get time on another telescope. That second telescope was the Atacama Large Millimeter Array or ALMA. It has better resolution power, allowing researchers to consider Venus to be more of a point of light source. This confirmed that the phosphine signal was still there and was very intense in the center when the poles and equator seemed to be absent. This means that it is present at sites where there is more top-down atmospheric circulation.
Researchers eventually concluded that phosphine was present, in the region of 20 parts.
How in the world did he get there?
Assuming that the analysis contains, the big question becomes how phosphine was found there. Researchers speculated that it would be destroyed by atmospheric conditions on Friday, and they used it to calculate how much phosphine needed to be produced to maintain 20 parts-billion levels. And then they went in search of some kind of chemical reaction that could produce a lot.
And, well, there aren’t a whole bunch of good options. Under atmospheric conditions, both phosphorus and hydrogen would normally be oxidized, and nowhere near as much. While solar radiation can potentially release some of the hydrogen that is there, it will do so very slowly and thermodynamics suggest that it reacts with anything other than phosphorus. Similarly, the reaction pathways based on the potential volcano of Venus will be reduced by about one million factors to produce enough phosphine.
All of this leads researchers to a somewhat disappointing conclusion: “If a known chemical process cannot explain PH3 within the atmosphere above Venus, it must be produced by a process previously not considered reasonable for the position of Venus.” Obviously, though, one of the impractical things that needs to be considered is that people were looking at phosphine in the first place, meaning that it could be produced by living things.
But there is no shortage of permeability associated with life on Venus. We will not recognize anything because life on the surface of a monstrous hot planet bathed in super structural carbon dioxide could probably survive. The temperature in the upper atmosphere, where the phosphin signature is produced, is more moderate. But it will need some kind of life that constantly revolves in the upper atmosphere and somehow stays in contact with the planet’s sulfuric acid clouds.
Incredible
So we are left in an awkward place. “It took me about 18 months to convince myself that there was a clue,” said one of the researchers who led the work. You can expect that the rest of the field will now spend some time explaining themselves as well, perhaps featuring a whole bunch of extra telescopes in Venus. Meanwhile, chemists are trying to think of additional reaction pathways that could work in a Venus-like situation.
There is a fair chance that we will report the results of these efforts a very long time ago, which shows that nothing unusual happens on another planet from the Sun. But if that doesn’t end, it will give a big push to the constant chorus of voices that argue that we need to do more work to explore Venus. Some plans include airships that could spend extended periods of time advancing the upper atmosphere of Venus. If these results are captured, airships seem to be the perfect means of finding out who produces this chemical.
Nature Astronomy, 2020. DOI: 10.1038 / s41550-020-1174-4 (About DOI).
