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Scientists are still accepting the slim possibility that life exists in the clouds of Venus. It turns out that the inhospitable planet has traces of phosphine in its atmosphere, and that often points to living organisms. This new analysis piqued biochemist Rakesh Mogul’s curiosity about past explorations of Venus. He examined NASA data collected in the late 1970s, and the analysis suggests that the original team may have lost a phosphine signal all those years ago.
The recent study in Nature Astronomy was a box office success in large part because of its thoroughness. The team made up of researchers from Cardiff University, MIT and other institutions reported the presence of phosphine and also explored numerous ways it could be produced on Venus. While there are some abiotic processes that can create phosphine molecules, they rely on extremely high temperatures and pressures like those found in gas giants. Venus shouldn’t be able to produce phosphine without life.
Hearing the news, Mogul and his co-authors turned to studies published decades ago after the 1978 Pioneer 13 mission. This NASA probe deployed an instrument called the Large Probe Neutral Mass Spectrometer (LNMS) in the atmosphere of Venus. The LNMS sampled the atmosphere and ran it through a mass spectrometer, which is a common way to identify chemical compounds.
Mogul noted that the original researchers did not discuss phosphate-containing molecules in their studies. Looking back at the raw data, the scientists detected signals that closely resembled phosphine. It’s hard to say for sure because the LNMS was not designed to detect these molecules. If the signals identified as probably Phosphine is indeed the genuine article, the concentrations would be a rough match for the Nature Astronomy study. Mogul’s team also detected several signals that could indicate chlorine, oxygen, and hydrogen peroxide. These are compounds associated with life, too, but they could have arisen in other ways as well.
This retro data analysis from NASA has been published on the prepress arXiv database and has therefore not been peer reviewed. However, this is far from the only operation to take a closer look at Venus. With all the interest surrounding Venus currently, we should receive a steady stream of news on this topic until someone can confirm or disprove the claims made in the study published last month.
ESA, NASA and even the private spaceflight company Rocket Lab have missions that could shed light on what is happening in the clouds of Venus. It may take a few years until we know for sure, but fingers crossed for the floating aliens.
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