Life Forms On Venus?
365Life forms on the planet Venus.
The surprise discovery of a gas that could indicate the presence of life on Venus has rekindled scientific interest in Earth's "twin" planet, and researchers and space agencies around the world are now competing to aim their instruments - both on Earth and in space - at the planet of clouds.
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The news dates back to September 14 and is now in the public domain, already commented on Insane Curiosity by another nice video that you can find here.
More than a month has passed since that day, and now we want to come back to the subject to better specify the terms of the question, to tell you the reactions of the scientific world (some of them very skeptical) and above all to answer the question that everyone is now asking themselves, namely: okay, maybe there is microbial life on Venus, but now what happens, how do we confirm it?
Let's proceed in order and calmly go through the whole story.
It is the week from 9 to 16 June 2017. We are on the Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii, where some of the largest telescopes in the world are crowded at an altitude of 4000 meters.
The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, a 15-meter diameter radio telescope (the largest ever designed for the study of the universe through submillimetric waves), is conducting surveys in the atmosphere of Venus, when incredibly the team led by astrophysicist Jane Greaves, realizes that the spectrum is showing, despite much background noise, a peak at 1.123 millimeters ...
The reason of such wonder by astronomers is soon said: to that wavelength is associated the presence of phosphine, that is a compound of phosphorus and hydrogen that on Venus should not theoretically exist! Let's see why.
Phosphine is a molecule formed by one atom of phosphorus and three of hydrogen (PH3). Also called hydrogen phosphide, it is a colorless gas, very unpleasant smell and highly toxic. On our planet it is produced only synthetically and used in agriculture as a pesticide, while in nature there are only very weak traces of it, almost entirely produced by anaerobic bacteria (i.e. that do not need oxygen to live) in putrescent environments such as marshes, animal intestines, guano, etc. ...
It is known, in fact, that some terrestrial bacteria are able to absorb phosphate minerals, add hydrogen and finally expel phosphine, in a process that requires a lot of energy. The reason why they do this is not yet clear, but it is assumed that it may be a waste product or a strategy to drive away rival microorganisms.
In other words: there are no known processes in nature that can produce phosphine without the involvement of a large bacterial colony! And this obviously explains the disbelief of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope astronomers in finding that specific and smelly molecule in the clouds of Venus!
A discovery made even more incredible by the measured amount: about 20 ppb (parts per billion), a thousand times higher than that found in the Earth's atmosphere! Rather high concentrations of phosphine had already been found elsewhere in the Solar System, in particular in the atmosphere of Jupiter and Saturn, but under such extreme conditions of pressure and temperature that it is quite unlikely to meet them on a rocky planet...
The fact is so sensational that Greaves has been forced to have all the doubts of the world. Have they done something wrong? Is the background noise too loud? Are those measurements really reliable?
A confirmation is obviously necessary, and there is only one other instrument in the world with a resolution that can confirm or deny the observations of the Hawaiian instrument: ALMA, the radio telescope complex located in the Chilean Atacama desert. But it takes time... these are instruments that have a very busy schedule and only almost two years later - on March 5, 2019 - 44 of ALMA's 66 antennas are able to target Venus.
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