On July 17, 2024, two research teams reported that have re-detected the phosphine, and have tentatively found ammonia as well. Phospine and ammonia are produced by living microorganisms. It’s not proof that living microbes are floating around in Venus’ atmosphere.
The findings presented at the national astronomy meeting in Hull on Wednesday bolster evidence for a pungent gas, phosphine, whose presence on Venus has been fiercely disputed.
Dave Clements, an astrophysicist at Imperial College London in the U.K., and his colleagues used the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii for the task. The observations were part of the JCMT-Venus project. The researchers detected the phosphine signature and were able to track it over time.
The surface of Venus reaches about 450C, hot enough to melt lead and zinc, the atmospheric pressure is 90 times that of the Earth’s surface and there are clouds of sulphuric acid. But about 50km (31 miles0 above the surface the temperature and pressure are closer to conditions on Earth – and potentially just about survivable for very hardy microbes.
“Our findings suggest that when the atmosphere is bathed in sunlight the phosphine is destroyed,” Clements said. “All that we can say is that phosphine is there. We don’t know what’s producing it. It may be chemistry that we don’t understand. Or possibly life.”
In a second talk, Prof Jane Greaves, an astronomer at Cardiff University, presented preliminary observations from the Green Bank telescope indicating ammonia, which on Earth is made through either industrial processes or by nitrogen-converting bacteria.
There are research papers that consider what could be producing the Phosphine on Venus.
No known process satisfactorily explains the presence of phosphine. Cloud particle or droplet surface photochemistry remain the most plausible abiotic source in our view, but remain to be explored in the lab to confirm if they can actually happen under Venus-like conditions. Uncertainties about phosphorus species kinetics and thermodynamics are a major barrier to accurate modelling of Venus atmosphere, surface and sub-surface chemistry, and would benefit from new measurements. However, such measurements are often difficult to perform, hence the narrow experimental base for current knowledge. A biological source for phosphine is not ruled out a priori, but is at best highly speculative. The biological explanation for Venusian PH3 seems to suffer from a lack of an apparent plausible evolutionary reason why life should expend substantial energy to produce a gas that it then appears to throw away.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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