Life on Venus? Astronomers see hint of life in clouds of Venus – By Doyle Rice (USA Today) / Sept 14 2020
- Astronomers spotted the chemical signature of phosphine, a gas that on Earth is only associated with life.
- Venus is a very challenging environment for life of any kind.
The new discovery was published in a paper in the peer-reviewed British journal Nature Astronomy. - Scientists Monday announced the discovery of a possible sign of life high in the clouds of Venus, according to a new study.
Using telescopes based in Chile and Hawaii, astronomers spotted in Venus’ clouds the chemical signature of phosphine, a noxious gas that on Earth is only associated with life.
Based on the many scenarios the astronomers considered, the team concluded that there is no explanation for the phosphine detected in Venus’ clouds, other than the presence of life.
“This means either this is life, or it’s some sort of physical or chemical process that we do not expect to happen on rocky planets,” said study co-author and Massachusetts Institute of Technology research scientist Janusz Petkowski.
Study co-author Sara Seager, an MIT planetary scientist, said researchers “exhaustively went through every possibility and ruled all of them out: volcanoes, lightning strikes, small meteorites falling into the atmosphere. … Not a single process we looked at could produce phosphine in high enough quantities to explain our team’s findings.”
Continue to article: https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/nation/2020/09/14/life-venus-astronomers-see-phosphine-hint-life-clouds-venus/5793706002/
