Signs of life on Venus: find traces of phosphine

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On Venus, a terribly inhospitable planet, there could be life, microbes floating in the atmosphere, 50-60 kilometers above the ground. A shocking news, and also embarrassing since it is not clear who generates the phosphine, a compound of phosphorus and hydrogen, which high-level scientists have seen with two of the most important existing telescopes: the optical one in Hawaii and the one with millimeter radio in the Atacama Desert, Chile.

More questions than answers

The group, made up of British astrophysicists from Cardiff and Americans from MIT, Boston, are sure what they saw, so to speak, the signing of this important molecule, but they don’t know how to justify it. It’s a classic example of how science asks more questions than it can have answers. Going in order: we also have phosphine here on Earth, and it is not a large molecule, since in nature it is formed in environments without oxygen, such as the stomach of some animals or in decomposition processes, always animal, and also has a strong smell. Let’s face it: it sucks. However, precisely because of this origin, it is considered a sign of the presence of life, at least microbial it is clear, not Venusians, at most microbes, with the characteristics mentioned above, swimming in the acidic atmosphere of Venus. At this point one wonders how they manage to resist given that the deadly, poisonous acidity of the atmosphere should kill any microbe in no time.

Prohibited temperatures

The other way that phosphine can be formed, i.e. in industrial processes, is obviously out of the question. So either there is a way to produce this blessed molecule that we do not yet know about or there must be something that continually produces and replaces it. And here comes the second problem: Venus is certainly very similar to Earth, in size, soil nature and mass, much more than small Mars, so to speak, but it has a soil temperature of about 400 degrees, due to the thick layer of clouds that cover and cause an unprecedented greenhouse effect. In other words, light and heat from the sun enter through the clouds, but bounce between the ground and the upper layers of the atmosphere from which they cannot escape, like ping pong balls bouncing between two walls. In fact, all the satellites that have tried to land on the ground of Venus have had a very short life, of seconds or a few minutes.

80% of the atmosphere is sulfuric acid

Another problem, apart from the temperature, is: how can these microbes, of short or long duration, live in an atmosphere that, at that height between the clouds, is composed of 80% sulfuric acid? English scientists ask this question, of course, if it is true that they are microbes, then they behave and have a completely different life than our terrestrial microbes. In summary, the work published in the journal Nature by the group of renowned scientists raises more questions than it solves, but this is also a typical mechanism of scientific research and discovery, it seems certainly confirmed, is still important. “An intriguing discovery, even if you have to go with leaden feet, a molecule, interesting as it is, is not enough to draw conclusions,” says Jhon Brucato, the leading Italian astrobiologist. To understand more, we should go to Venus with a sound balloon and analyze those particular layers of the atmosphere. NASA has been thinking about it for some time for the truth. There are no green men on Venus, therefore, but, at best, strange and even unpleasant microbes. We continue investigating, as always.