She has long studied the gas, on the theory that finding it being emitted from rocky planets that orbit distant stars could be proof that life exists elsewhere in the Milky Way. Greaves’s team had relied on the erroneous data to confirm the presence of phosphine, and several of the response papers had used them too. “All viewpoints are important, and we should treat our colleagues with respect.”. In earlier days of the solar system, Earth was not so hospitable to the likes of us. On such worlds, “as far as we can tell, only life can make phosphine,” Dr. Sousa-Silva said. Possible sign of life on Venus stirs up heated debate “Something weird is happening” in the clouds of the planet next door—but some experts are raising doubts about the quality of the data. What makes the discovery of phosphine in Venus’ air so compelling is that the researchers have racked their brains trying to come up with ways to explain its presence short of invoking biology. In September, news about the possibility of floating, cloud-based life on Venus caused a storm in the science world as tumultuous as the sulfur clouds that … Something deadly might be wafting through the clouds shrouding Venus—a smelly, flammable gas called phosphine that annihilates life-forms reliant on oxygen for survival. If the case becomes weaker, the search might end in a quieter way, with telescope facilities rejecting proposals for observations, says Ignas Snellen, an astronomer at Leiden University and one of the researchers who believes that the tantalizing signal is really sulfur dioxide. Back in September, one team of scientists reported that it had discovered evidence of a toxic gas called phosphine in the planet’s atmosphere. Like I said before, phosphene is produced on earth by organisms that are living in environments that are very poor in oxygen. Dr. Sousa-Silva, Dr. Greaves and their colleagues had planned to complete additional telescope observations earlier this year. “It will definitely fuel more research into the possibilities for life in Venus’s atmosphere.”, “We know that it is an extraordinary discovery,” said Clara Sousa-Silva, a molecular astrophysicist at Harvard University whose research has focused on phosphine, and another of the authors. Life on Venus is a shoegaze band from Moscow, Russia. On Venus there is a sweet spot at 48 to 60 km (30 to 37 miles) above Venus' surface, in the clouds, where the temperature is not too hot, not too cold, but just right for life. Telescope observations don’t produce handy readouts that say Yes phosphine or No phosphine. The finding also follows a history of detections of gases on other worlds that can be byproducts of life. Those who have detected evidence of phosphine in Venus’s clouds say that although the case for it might be weaker, it’s not dead yet; those who don’t see evidence of it say that the phosphine researchers are seeing only what they want to see. "Even the publications that [say] no phosphine have their own different ways of saying no phosphine,” Clara Sousa-Silva, an astrochemist who studies phosphine at Harvard, and one of Greaves’s co-authors, told me recently. On Earth, this gas signifies life. “What we find circumstantially also makes complete sense with what we know thermodynamically,” she said. Instead, for decades, scientists have sought signs of life elsewhere, usually peering outward to Mars and more recently at Europa, Enceladus and other icy moons of the giant planets. It is also extremely poisonous. Most of the papers haven’t undergone peer review, the careful process by which ideas are tested and honed for publication in scientific journals. Volcanic activity and lightning on Venus would not be sufficient to add more of this constantly disappearing phosphine, according to the researchers’ models. M.I.T. Published 14 Sep 2020, 16:48 BST, Updated 5 Nov 2020, 04:57 GMT. Scientists have designed and proposed new missions to the planet, but their journeys are years away. a planetary scientist and head of the Johnson Biosignatures Lab at Georgetown University, the oxygen-rich environment that later developed, Mars is currently ringed by orbiters and prowled by NASA rovers, declined to fund a number of Venus missions. And there’s still enough of it to consider the possibility that it might be produced by some kind of life. “I wasn’t really expecting that we’d detect anything,” Greaves told me in September. So close, so similar and very mysterious, the planet is surprising scientists with a chemical signature spotted in its clouds. Is there life on Venus? “We know that extremophiles on Earth can exist in acidic environment, but that acidic environment might only be 5 per cent, and it’s still very much water based. Venus now jumps to the top of the list of targets in our Solar System where astrobiologists are looking for microbial life. Stargazing with Pete - September 2020. Some researchers question this hypothesis, and they suggest instead that the gas could result from unexplained atmospheric or geologic processes on a planet that remains mysterious. And given the amount of gas being produced, the population of these microbes would be ample. Yes, indeed as of September 13th, 2020 there was compelling and rather robust evidence suggested by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cardiff University and elsewhere, that have observed what may be signs of life in the clouds of Venus, to be announced on September 14th, 2020. But it’s good science at work. ", Sousa-Silva and her colleagues expected the scrutiny, of course, and even welcomed it. Of all those attempts, only two managed to directly capture images of the planet’s surface. Gathered on little screens in the Zoom room—this is still 2020, after all—were scientists on opposing sides of the most intriguing mystery in astronomy to emerge this year: What’s going on inside the clouds of Venus? And nobody knows whether the microbes, if real, are based on DNA like us, or something entirely different. Aliens, though, are not the subject of the current debate. But in the months since the big announcement, the enthusiasm has dissipated. Hot enough to melt metal and with clouds full of acid, any life that could survive in the atmosphere of Venus would have to be capable of enduring extremes. It’s been a while — like, forever — since anyone claimed to have discovered life on Venus. Top panel: Cloud cover on Venus is permanent and continuous, with the middle and lower cloud layers at temperatures that are suitable for life. Posted on December 19, 2020 by tonyheller The World Economic Forum has discovered life on Venus! It can also be produced by geological processes. The team spent a year recreating the Venusian environment in computer simulations to test different explanations for the phosphine’s source and abundance. Venus is a very challenging environment for life of any kind. The 2020 WBZ Gingerbread ... “it’s probably a 10% chance that it’s life,” Yeah right. In 1962, the Mariner 2 probe confirmed that the surface of Venus was too hot for Earth life–800°F. But on smaller, rocky planets like Earth and Venus, the researchers say, there is not enough energy to produce copious amounts of phosphine in the same way. “We disagree on how much signal there is in different places, and then we disagree on who is making that signal as strong as it is, and how. But the coronavirus pandemic and Venus’s limited time above the horizon interfered with their ability to gather more evidence, leaving many questions unanswered. While Venus is similar to Earth in size, mass, and rocky composition, its surface temperatures reach 900 °F, and its […] No ruling body of the solar system, no Supreme Court of astronomy, will someday pass down the definitive determination about phosphine on Venus. While few doubt whether this phosphine is there, what kind of life in the clouds of Venus would it take to actually make the gas? “This is an astonishing and ‘out of the blue’ finding,” said Sara Seager, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an author of the papers (one published in Nature Astronomy and another submitted to the journal Astrobiology). But we don't see intelligent life scattered about the universe. The science community is divided—enough that one rebuttal paper had the authors “invite” the researchers who originally identified the phosphine to consider retracting their study altogether. In that setting, Dr. Sousa-Silva said, life is not necessary to form phosphine. There was life here then, even an entire biosphere that did not survive in the oxygen-rich environment that later developed. While Venus is similar to Earth in size, mass, and … The second-closest planet to the Sun, Venus is inhospitable — with a surface temperature around 867°F (464°C) and pressure 92 times that of on the Earth. It's believed to have had oceans billions of years ago. For now, the best views are from Earth. Dr. Sousa-Silva was surprised when Dr. Greaves said that she had detected phosphine. And that debate unfolded with plenty of spacecraft on and around Mars, with instruments capable of sifting the soil and sniffing the atmosphere. It could be a chemical process that no one had ever seen before, or—maybe, possibly, probably not, but it just can’t be ruled out—some form of Venusian life. Jane Greaves, an astronomer at Cardiff University in Wales, set out in June 2017 to test that hypothesis using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, looking for signs of various molecules on Venus. Other scientists have raised doubts about the research. Space programs have tried dozens of robotic missions to Venus, many of them in the Soviet Union’s Venera series. Experts from the UK, however, found signs of phosphine in Venus’ atmosphere — suggesting the planet must support unknown chemical processes, or even life. In their own paper, he noted, the researchers wrote that “the detection of phosphine is not robust evidence for life, only for anomalous and unexplained chemistry.”, A similar note of caution was voiced by James Kasting, a geoscientist and expert on planetary habitability at Pennsylvania State University, who said, “The model atmospheric composition that they show is, at best, incomplete.”. I can see why Bowie choose to sing about Mars instead, it’s easier to sing for one thing. “What we’ve done is rule out all other sources of phosphine other than life,” Dr. Bains said. And much as Earth over time became a home for jellyfish, ferns, dinosaurs and Homo sapiens, Venus was transformed by something into a hell. 578: Life on Venus?!? Gathered on little screens in the Zoom room—this is still 2020, ... Grinspoon has written about the possibility of life on Venus since the 1990s, but was not involved in the latest research. When Greaves and her colleagues examined their sets of squiggly lines, they saw a distinct dip, a sign of a molecule absorbing a particular wavelength of light. Another group reached decades into the past and found a potential signal for phosphine, buried in data from a NASA mission that started studying Venus in 1978. At least not yet. ... which found a possible sign of life on Venus. “Strictly speaking, from a scientific point of view, you can never prove that there is no phosphine,” Snellen told me, but “at some point, you have to stop looking.”, An absence of phosphine wouldn’t mean that Venus must be uninhabited. Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that's out of this world. Decades later, Jane Greaves, an astronomer at Cardiff University, directed a telescope at our next-door neighbor. Greaves had come across research that suggested astronomers looking for extraterrestrial life should consider checking for phosphine on exoplanets, since any alien astronomers looking back at us could likely spot signs of the same gas on Earth. Posted on September 23, 2020 September 23, 2020 by Dr. Paul Edmon. Different species of molecules will absorb radio waves coming through the clouds at different characteristic wavelengths. and Harvard astronomers see a signal in its clouds The scientists say they've detected a chemical that could have only been created by living organisms. Recorded in secret before the … That is more than 90 times the 14.7 pounds per square inch at sea level on Earth, or the equivalent to being 3,000 feet underwater in the ocean. “How cool to find it on Venus.”, She added: “Venus has been ignored by NASA for so long. And even if no phosphine exists on Venus—even if Venus isn’t the place where we first detect life outside of Earth—some other molecule, someday, could galvanize the scientific community like this molecule did, and spark another debate that could bring us closer to answering some of our most existential questions. Starguide: November 2020 — Life beyond Venus. Venus was the first planet human beings ever explored with spacecraft. ONE of the biggest news stories of 2020 was the apparent sighting of phosphine in Venus’s atmosphere. Gathered on little screens in the Zoom room—this is still 2020, ... Grinspoon has written about the possibility of life on Venus since the 1990s, but was not involved in the latest research. In scientific literature, that counts as quite a salty attack, enough to make other researchers wince. Trump refuses to accept Biden's win as transition proceeds. The immense heat and pressures can jam the phosphorus and hydrogen atoms together to form the molecule. On the TV show “Breaking Bad,” the main character, Walter White, makes it to kill two rivals. Militaries have employed it for chemical warfare, and it is used as a fumigant on farms. The announcement in September took … In an extremely 2020 plot twist, aliens might be real after all. She did not expect to find it. Other planetary scientists counter that a non-biological origin cannot be ruled out. And NASA, which has declined to fund a number of Venus missions in recent decades, announced in February that it would consider a pair of proposed spacecraft among four finalists competing for a round of funding. On Earth, this gas is only produced by living organisms, and there seems to … Not finding life on Venus would be disappointing. The shortest answer is that astronomy is hard. Mars scientists spent 15 years debating whether there’s truly methane gas—which can be produced by both chemical processes and living organisms—on the red planet, and only recently reached some agreement. Scientists don’t usually work with raw data, relying instead on telescope staff to provide them with carefully refined information. 6 talking about this. Why would determining this simple fact be complicated? After the news came out, other scientists around the world dug into the research, and a flurry of papers started appearing online. Hypothetical life cycle of the Venusian microorganisms. Like I said before, phosphene is produced on earth by organisms that are living in environments that are very poor in oxygen. Let me answer the click-bait question above immediately by saying that life has not been found on Venus. The dense atmosphere of Venus exerts a pressure of more than 1,300 pounds per square inch on anything at the surface. Science, especially science at the edge of current knowledge, is supposed to be an intellectual scuffle, and this one is still in motion. The possibility of life on Venus is a subject of interest in astrobiology due to its proximity and similarities to Earth.To date, no definitive proof has been found of past or present life on Venus.Theories have decreased significantly since the early 1960s, when spacecraft began studying the planet and it became clear that its environment is extreme compared to Earth's. They’ll have to wait until the spring and summer, when Venus moves into a more convenient spot, for the next round of observations. Although the surface of Venus is like a blast furnace, a cloud layer just 31 miles below the top of its atmosphere may reach temperatures as low as 86 degrees Fahrenheit, and has a pressure similar to that at ground level on Earth. Robotic space missions to Venus could also advance the search. On Earth, the gas is produced by microorganisms. Before their imaginations run away, the researchers want to gather more telescope data and see their models tested and challenged. To make matters more complicated, it turned out that there was a problem with the raw data from one of the two telescopes involved in the research, and they would need to be reprocessed. Greaves and her team eventually reanalyzed the corrected data. They determined that this chemical signature belonged to phosphine. In a paper published in August, Dr. Seager and her colleagues suggested that microbes borne aloft on air currents called gravity waves could live, metabolize and reproduce inside droplets of sulfuric acid and water. “There’s not a lot of understanding of where it’s coming from, how it forms, things like that,” said Matthew Pasek, a geoscientist at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Venus, named after the Roman goddess of beauty, roasts at temperatures of hundreds of degrees and is cloaked by clouds that contain droplets of corrosive sulfuric acid. The detection of phosphine gas in the clouds of Venus—a possible sign of life—might be due to a fluke in data processing, new analyses suggest. Phosphine can’t survive for very long in Venus’s atmosphere, so if the gas were there, something would have to be replenishing the supply. Few have focused on the rocky planet as a habitat for something living. Chemists compare phosphine to a pyramid — one atom of phosphorus topping a base of three hydrogen atoms. Planetary scientist Sara Seager: This is an astonishing and ‘out of the blue’ finding. At least not yet. Yeah, yeah. High in the toxic atmosphere of the planet Venus, astronomers on Earth have discovered signs of what might be life. But we don't see intelligent life scattered about the universe. The team needed a more powerful telescope, and the scientists next used the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, in Chile, in March 2019. But living things could emit enough of the gas. In the same era, astronomers Carl Sagan and Harold Morowitz suggested that, although Venusian ground was inhospitable to life, its atmosphere might not be. Sept. 19, 2020. It seems like these are huge disagreements, but they come down to teeny, tiny decisions and data-processing mechanisms. Thursday, 17 September 2020 | Pioneer. The Sky at Night gains exclusive access to the team of scientists behind the recent discovery of possible signs of life on Venus. There is one thing, however, that appears to be very good at producing it: anaerobic life, or microbial organisms that don’t require or use oxygen. A lethal technological move I highly recommend reading these two articles by Phil Plait and ArsTechnica about what was found. The phosphine’s still there, they say, although the signal is far fainter than they first reported. He said that although he was “skeptical of it being life, I don’t have a better explanation for what it is.”. By Nadia Drake. This time, they found, all signs pointed to phosphine, and a lot of it, ranging from 5 to 20 parts per billion. September 18, 2020 Media Lario S.r.l. Scientists have detected phosphine gas in the upper atmosphere of Venus. Suddenly, Venus was one of the most enticing targets in the search for life beyond Earth, and in those first moments, other scientists in the field were unusually excited about the research and its implications. Starting in the 1960s, a series of Soviet missions revealed a furnace of a world, with a thick, cloudy atmosphere that keeps the surface so hot that lead would melt on it like ice on Earth. Less than one billion years ago, the climate dramatically changed due to a runaway greenhouse effect. If there is life on Venus, then a wet temperate world such as Earth will almost certainly give rise to an intelligent species. By Paul Voosen Nov. 17, 2020 , 2:50 PM. Venus inhospitable. If life did exist in the clouds of Venus it would be very different to anything on Earth, Dr Dempsey said. The original team has revised its findings. But the finding will also encourage some planetary scientists to ask whether humanity has overlooked a planet that may have once been more Earthlike than any other world in our solar system. ... More clips from Life on Venus. Today, the second planet from the sun has an atmosphere stifled by carbon dioxide gas, and surface temperatures that average more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit. 2020 in review: The hunt for life on Venus continues. Traces of life on Venus now seem dubious Paola Rosa-Aquino 11/2/2020. Potential signs of life on Venus are fading as astronomers downgrade their original claims. But at a closer glance, the less lovely it becomes. (The researchers later removed that wording and apologized.). But I’m not ready to set solar sail for Venus just yet. Less than one billion years ago, the climate dramatically changed due to a runaway greenhouse effect. It is hardly a place that makes visiting or research easy, although that doesn’t mean people haven’t tried. “Despite prior speculation (mostly by the same authors), this can hardly be taken as a biosignature,” Gerald Joyce, a biologist at the Salk Institute in California who has experimented with creating life in the lab, said in an email. Many planetary scientists, including Carl Sagan and Harold Morowitz, who proposed the idea 53 years ago, have hypothesized life may exist there. We know that alien theories are usually easily squashed. “We’ve seen it associated with where microbes are at, but we have not seen a microbe do it, which is a subtle difference, but an important one.”. “And if one were to try to sum up who’s right, who’s wrong—right now, it would be a maddening exercise.”, Read: A hint of water in the atmosphere of a faraway planet. congratulates the team at the ALMA Telescope Array in Atacama, Chile, and the entire scientific team involved in the discovery of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus, indicating the possibility of life on our neighboring planet, as was announced on September 13 in published scientific papers that were submitted to the International Journal of Astrobiology . The controversial part of this discovery was supposed to be the suggestion that life could exist in Venus’s clouds. UFO hunters are convinced they have found evidence of life on Venus, sharing photographs of what they believe are alien-built structures. This would make sense for Venus obviously because the atmosphere is just so densely composing carbon dioxide. The hothouse planet, Earth’s nearest planetary neighbor, suddenly looks more intriguing as a potential abode of life. Doubts about the existence of phosphine gas on Venus—a possible … The Pioneer Venus Multiprobe before NASA launched it in 1978. Phosphine, a stinky, toxic and flammable gas found on Earth, has been detected in the atmosphere of Venus. Phosphine is shaped like a pyramid with three atoms of hydrogen bonded to a single atom of phosphorus. Here on Earth, phosphine is found in our intestines, in the feces of badgers and penguins, and in some deep sea worms, as well as other biological environments associated with anaerobic organisms. Been a while — like, forever — since anyone claimed to have had oceans billions of years ago considered. 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