Venus’s atmosphere contains traces of phosphine gas, scientists said Monday.
Venus’s atmosphere contains traces of phosphine gas, which on Earth is associated with living organisms, scientists said Monday, taking a fresh look at conditions in our closest planetary neighbor.
Conditions on Venus are often described as hellish with daytime temperatures high enough to melt lead and an atmosphere made up almost entirely of carbon dioxide.
A team of experts used telescopes in Hawaii and the Atacama Desert in Chile to observe the upper cloud cover of Venus, about 60 kilometers (45 miles) from the surface.
They detected traces of phosphine, a flammable gas that is produced on Earth by the decomposition of organic matter.
Writing in Nature Astronomy, the team emphasized that the presence of phosphine alone does not prove the presence of life on Venus.
However, since the clouds that swirled around its roasting surface are highly acidic and therefore destroy phosphine very quickly, the research showed that something was creating it again.
The researchers performed several modeling calculations in an attempt to explain the new phosphine production.
They concluded that their research provided evidence for “anomalous and inexplicable chemistry” on Venus.
Alan Duffy, an astronomer at Swinburne University and chief scientist at the Royal Institution of Australia, said it was “one of the most exciting signs of the possible presence of life beyond Earth that I have ever seen.”
However, he cautioned that while it was tempting to believe that phosphine was produced by life forms, “we have to rule out all other possible non-biological means of producing it.”
Venus is a subject of great interest among astronomers. It is so close and so similar in size to Earth that some experts believe it serves as a warning of the dangers of runaway climate change.
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