Sign of life on Venus discovered with Hawaii telescope

That paper is more than a year oldā€¦ published in September 2020. Since then, several studies have challenged - although not entirely debunked - the report.

Subsequently, on 28 January 2021, this was published in the journal ā€˜Natureā€™:

Now, a team of scientists has published the biggest critique yet. ā€œWhat we bring to the table is a comprehensive look, another way of explaining this data that isnā€™t phosphine,ā€ says Victoria Meadows, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle who helped to lead the latest studies. Both papers have been accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters and were posted on the arXiv preprint server on 26 January.

Alternative explanations

In one study, Meadows and her colleagues analysed data from one of the telescopes used to make the phosphine claim - and could not detect the gasā€™s spectral signature. In the other, the scientists calculated how gases would behave in Venusā€™s atmosphere - and concluded that what the original team thought was phosphine is actually sulfur dioxide (SO2), a gas that is common on Venus and is not a sign of possible life.

The latest papers pretty clearly show that there is no sign of the gas, says Ignas Snellen, an astronomer at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands who has published a different critique of the phosphine claim. ā€œThis makes the whole debate about phosphine, and possibly life in the atmosphere of Venus, quite irrelevant.ā€
 

Litte too hot for me.

Any life there would have to tolerate temperatures that melts lead.

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Litte too hot for me.

Any life there would have to tolerate temperatures that melts lead.

Surface temperature isnā€™t necessarily that relevant when considering the possibility of microbial life. Yes, the surface of Venus is extremely hostile but once you get 50-65km up, the atmosphere is the most Earth-like of all the other planets in our solar system. Atmospheric pressure and temperature are broadly the same as typical Earth conditions and a breathable mixture of 21% oxygen/78% Nitrogen permeates through it (in small quantities) as a ā€œlifting gasā€.



Nevertheless, the ā€˜phosphineā€™ claim as an atmospheric indicator for life has been debunked.
 

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