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An international team of scientists has discovered the possibility of life on Venus using the James Clark Maxwell Telescope on the island of Hawaii.
The discovery of a rare gaseous compound called phosphine in the clouds of Venus is described in a paper published today in the journal Nature Astronomy. The lead author is Jane Greaves, a former Mauna Kea astronomer who is now a professor at Cardiff University in Wales.
The discovery of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus could well indicate the “aerial” life of the outside world, according to the paper. This gas of hydrogen and phosphorus on Earth is naturally produced only by microorganisms that exist in an oxygen free atmosphere.
Phosphin was first detected in the clouds of Venus using the James Clark Maxwell Telescope, a radio telescope where Graves worked in the 1990s.
The JCMT is the world’s largest single-dish astronomical telescope designed specifically to work in the field of submillimeter wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum and was one of the observations used by scientists who unveiled the first image of a black hole last year.
After finding phosphine on Venus in Hawaii, a team of scientists confirmed the discovery using 45 telescopes of the Attica Large Millimeter / Submillimeter Arena in Chile.
In the end both features saw the same thing: absorption at a wavelength suitable for phosphine gas, where the atom is backlit by hot clouds below.
“These results are incredible,” said Jessica Dempsey, JCMT’s deputy director. “They affect the search for life outside our solar system.”
Astronomers have speculated for years that high clouds on Venus could provide a home for microbes floating far from the planet’s super-hot surface to receive water and sunlight, but also need to tolerate extremely high acidity.
When Dempsey thought that Greaves wanted time for a telescope to search for phosphine, he was mad, which seemed very unlikely at the time.
“It was so insane that you could only do what they wanted to do on two or three telescopes across the planet, and others refused.”
But the Greaves belonged to the family, Dempsey said, and so the JCMT telescope was pointed for five days in 2017 on Friday so they could find out what.
Dempsey said, “Jane didn’t even expect to find out.”
But she discovered phosphin in the intermediate layer of Venus clouds about 31 to 37 miles above the planet’s surface.
The team then worked to calculate whether phosphine could come from natural processes on Venus. Most of the pathways – such as surface-mounted minerals, volcanoes or lightning – could not be built anywhere close enough, scientists found. But the team also found that to make the observed amount of phosphine on Venus, terrestrial organisms would have to work only 10% of their maximum productivity.
Any microbes on Venus can be very different from those found on Earth, where bacteria can absorb phosphate minerals, add hydrogen and eventually release phosphine gas.
Clara Sosa Silva, a team member and researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published a paper in January describing phosphine as a promising biosignature gas in the exoplanet atmosphere.
Back in Hawaii the JCMT equipment used to capture this phosphine discovery has retired; It was replaced by a newer and more powerful tool called salt.
The new instrument, named after Larry Kimura, a Hawaiian-language scholar at the University of Hawaii-Hill, has been deployed over the past few months for Greaves’ team to take additional steps on Venus and explore other gases associated with life.
Dempsey said that since Venus is so close, it is possible to send probes to Earth to collect samples from the clouds and bring them back to Earth. He said the trip could be completed in just three or four months.
The paper lists four JCMT staff members who operated the telescope here in 2017 as authors, including E’Lisa Lee, a former UH-Hill astronomy student.
“The biochemical process found on anything other than the Earth has the greatest and most profound effect on our understanding of life on Earth,” Lee said in a statement.
