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Possible signs of life have been detected on Venus.
Researchers have detected phosphine in the atmosphere of our neighboring planet, suggesting that it may be home to alien life.
The discovery is not a direct observation of life on another planet. But the large amount of phosphine on Venus cannot be explained through any known process, leading researchers to suggest that it is a sign of extraterrestrial life in our solar system.
On Earth, phosphine is one of the most smelly and toxic gases, smelling like rotten fish and is found in places like pond slime and penguin manure. While it is made through some industrial processes, it is also created by anaerobic organisms, such as bacteria and microbes.
As such, it is believed to be an excellent “biological signature” or indication of life. In the past, experts suggested that the discovery of phosphine in large quantities on other rocky planets would be a true indicator of extraterrestrial life, and now it has been found on Venus.
The surface of Venus is warm and acidic, so soil conditions would make any kind of life difficult. But the environment in its upper cloud levels is believed to be more habitable: at about 35 kilometers up, conditions are more temperate.
That is where the gas is believed to be. Those clouds are so acidic that they would quickly destroy any phosphine, which means that something must be actively forming it, and the amount of gas found is such that it cannot be easily explained otherwise.
An international team of researchers led by Jane Greaves from Cardiff University reports the findings in a paper, ‘Phosphine gas in the cloud covers of Venus’, published today in Nature Astronomy.
They warn that there is no way to know for sure what the findings mean, and conclude in that document that the detection “is not solid evidence for life, only for anomalous and inexplicable chemistry,” and that more work will be required to find out. by the way. But they have discarded all other explanations based on what we know about Venus.
“Either phosphine is produced by some kind of chemical or geological process that nobody knows about, or there could be a biological reason,” said Emily Drabek-Maunder, an astrophysicist at the Royal Greenwich Observatory and author of the paper.
“Our study is not conclusive that this is evidence of life. However, what is exciting is that we have found this rare gas in the upper atmosphere of Venus.
“Our team cannot explain the amount of phosphine that we have found, through our current understanding of the planet. When we try to model what is happening in the atmosphere (volcanic activity, sunlight or even lightning), nothing recreates the amount of gas phosphine we’ve seen. “
David Clements, a scientist at Imperial College London who also authored the article, described the findings in terms of a detective novel. “This is not irrefutable proof,” he said. “This is not even bullet residue in the prime suspect’s hands. But there is a distinctive cordite smell in the room.
“It is a step on the road to the potential discovery of life of some kind in the upper atmosphere of Venus. But we have many, many more steps to go before we can say there is life on Venus.”
Experts who were not involved in the research described the findings as a “really exciting result”, noting that the findings at least show very unusual processes taking place on Venus. The planet, acidic and hot enough to melt lead, has not been one of the main places in the solar system that researchers have searched for extraterrestrial life.
“This would certainly be a very hellish environment. I’m not using that phrase lightly,” Lewis Dartnell, an astrobiologist at the University of Westminster who was not involved in the study, told The Independent.
“It’s hot, it’s extremely acidic.
“I don’t think any astrobiologist, and certainly not myself, would have placed Venus at the top of the list,” he says, pointing to better candidates like Europa, the icy moon that orbits Jupiter and Mars. “But you definitely wouldn’t have gone for our next door neighbor on the other side.”
The discovery came as something of an accident, when the researchers sought to conduct a test to determine whether phosphine could be detected in the environment of Venus as a way to establish a technical baseline. “We had no expectation that there were actually any there,” Dr. Clements said.
But the observations unexpectedly revealed the discovery that there was a detectable amount of phosphine in the clouds over Venus.
“It went from ‘let’s try this, it’s an interesting problem, and we can set some parameters for what needs to be done’, to ‘OMG we’ve found it, what the hell does that mean?'”
Later research used the James Clark Maxwell telescope and then the ALMA telescope, the world’s largest, to confirm that phosphine could actually be seen in the atmosphere of Venus. A unique signature could be detected in the data and indicated that about 20 parts per billion of the clouds on Venus were composed of phosphine.
“This was an experiment done out of sheer curiosity, actually taking advantage of the powerful technology of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) and thinking of future instruments,” said Jane Greaves of Cardiff University, who led the study. It would be able to rule out extreme scenarios, such as clouds full of organisms. When we got the first hints of phosphine in the Venus spectrum, it was a shock! “
Helen Fraser, an astronomy researcher at the Open University, described the team at the time as “very excited” and that it was a “time when butterflies win their stomachs.”
“It is a possible sign of life. But the scientist in me becomes very cautious and says that what we have discovered is phosphine”, not a direct and definitive sign of extraterrestrial life. However, he noted, as he “peels off all the layers” to find alternative possibilities – what Dr. Fraser described as a lengthy process of consulting existing research to understand whether something else could produce such amounts of phosphine – is it remains with the realization that the simplest explanation is that there is some form of life that generates gas.
The breakthrough comes after a major article published last year indicated that phosphine was perhaps as safe a sign of life as it could be. MIT research found that if phosphine were found on a rocky planet, it would be a decisive sign of extraterrestrial life.
“Here on Earth, oxygen is a really impressive sign of life,” said Clara Sousa-Silva, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, who was the lead author of that paper and was part of the team. behind the new discovery. “But other things besides life also produce oxygen.
“It’s important to consider stranger molecules that might not be produced as often, but if you find them on another planet, there is only one explanation,” he said in a statement when that work was published.
Scientists now hope to do more work to better understand the processes that are happening on Venus, and if there might still be an undiscovered explanation for phosphine that doesn’t point to extraterrestrial life.
That will include looking at Venus over time, to understand if the amount of phosphene changes throughout the year. Scientists can then look for trends or changes over time, which in turn could give a little more clue as to where the phosphine gas is coming from.
But the most important job will be to send a spacecraft to Venus to study the atmosphere directly, floating on clouds that could contain life and examining what can be found there. “If we want to confirm life in the clouds of Venus, what we really have to do is send a spacecraft to study the atmosphere in detail,” said Dr. Drabek-Maunder.
The “absolutely perfect” situation would be to launch a sample return mission, which could bring back some of the atmosphere for study on Earth, Dr. Clements said. “Assuming there is life there, you can apply everything that we can do in a terrestrial laboratory to deeply understand what is happening,” he said, examining actual biochemistry to find out exactly how any possible life could actually work.
Venusian life is likely to be single-celled bacteria-like life forms that live in the droplets of liquid that form clouds that hang over the planet’s surface, scientists speculate. Those liquid droplets are made up of up to 90 percent sulfuric acid, about a billion times more acidic than even the most acidic environment on Earth, so it likely has some substantial differences from anything you can find. on our planet.
But researchers will also seek to uncover the underlying processes that allow life to thrive and reproduce, which could allow us to answer some of the deeper questions about life itself.
“If we confirm that there is indeed life there, the next thing we are going to want to check is whether we are related,” says Professor Dartnell. “Does it use DNA, proteins that are the same as us, or is it fundamentally foreign?”
If it is the latter, then it would tell us that there is an independent origin of life, which was not transferred from Earth to Venus. In the early days of the solar system, the planets were “effectively sneezing” with each other, Professor Dartnell said, in a way that could have transferred life between different worlds.
However, if the two things happened separately, it could suggest that life spans the entire universe. Since the discovery was made on our neighboring planet, it would indicate that the same could have happened elsewhere and further afield.
“If life formed independently on Venus, then life is probably much more common than we think,” Drabek-Maunder said.
