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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. Image: Michael Benson – NASA / JPL / AFP /
Venus’s atmosphere contains a gas that, on Earth, can be attributed to living organisms, scientists said Monday, September 14.
It is a discovery that the director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) called “the most significant development so far” in the search for extraterrestrial life.
Conditions in our planetary neighbor are often described as hellish with daytime temperatures high enough to melt lead and an atmosphere made up almost entirely of carbon dioxide.
However, a team of experts detected traces of phosphine, a flammable gas that is often produced on Earth by the decomposition of organic matter. They used telescopes in Hawaii and the Atacama Desert in Chile to look at Venus’ upper cloud cover, about 60 kilometers (45 miles) from the surface.
Writing in Nature Astronomy, the team emphasized that the presence of phosphine did not prove the presence of life on Venus. But, since the clouds swirling around its scorching 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.
Lead author Jane Greaves, from Cardiff University’s School of Physics and Astronomy, told Agence France-Presse that the presence of phosphine alone was not proof of life in Earth’s neighbor.
“I don’t think we can say that even if a planet was abundant in phosphorus, it might lack something more important to life, some other element, or the conditions might be too hot or too dry,” he said.
Greaves added that it was the first time phosphine had been found on a rocky planet other than Earth.
The advance was hailed by NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who tweeted: “Time to prioritize Venus.”
“Life on Venus? The discovery of phosphine, a by-product of anaerobic biology, is the most significant advance yet in building the case for life outside of Earth, ”he wrote.
Most of the current efforts to search for past alien life are focused on Mars, which is known to once contain all the ingredients necessary to support carbon-based organisms. The United States and China recently sent rovers to the Red Planet, while the United Arab Emirates sent an atmospheric probe.
‘Exciting’
Reacting to the study, Alan Duffy, an astronomer at Swinburne University and senior scientist at the Royal Institution of Australia, said that while it was tempting to believe that phosphine was produced by life forms, “we have to rule out all the other possible no biological means to produce it “.
He called the find “one of the most exciting signs of the possible presence of life beyond Earth that I have ever seen.”
Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, who has conducted several flybys of Venus, called Monday’s research “intriguing.”
“As with an increasing number of planetary bodies, Venus is proving to be an exciting place of discovery, although it has not been a major part of the search for life,” he tweeted.
He added that the planet was the focus of two of NASA’s next four candidate missions under its Discovery Program, as well as the proposed European EnVision mission, in which NASA is a partner.
Venus, which rotates in the opposite direction to Earth and where a day lasts 243 times longer, is a topic of great interest among astronomers.
It is so close and so similar in size to our home planet that some experts believe it serves as a warning of the dangers of runaway climate change. Previous studies have uncovered tantalizing clues that suggest Venus has active volcanoes, including signs of recent lava flows. DC
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