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.
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If you can find life 3km into the crust, you can probably find it many places
The life in the Venusian clouds wouldn’t have had to evolve on Venus independently. If impacted debris ejected into space from meteors striking Mars can find there way to Earth then why couldn’t the same cause debris from Earth to find there way to Venus in the remote past?
Earth’s oceans reach 90X Earth’s atmospheric pressure at 2,970 feet depth. It’s 33 per 1 additional atmosphere as one descends into the ocean: https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/pressure.html.
Life easily exists down there, even down to the Mariana Trench, which is a bone-crushing 36,201 feet down, but it’s so gelatinous it has a hard time living at surface levels.
As Robert C pointed out, life can exist in sulfuric acid pools on Earth too. The problem is lack of water…but wait, according to recent studies “Information using Venus’s cloud data prove that minimal amounts of water vapor exist in Venus’s clouds” – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_on_Venus. The water cycle isn’t what we’re used to on Earth, because Venus has no water on its well-above-boiling-point surface, but it could recycle water from upper to lower atmosphere as it makes its very slow 116.75 Earth day rotation. We’ve been looking for life in all the wrong places then, descending rapidly through the most likely region with space probes, and landing at the least likely place to find life. It would be like going to the Mariana Trench to search for whales. What’s needed are balloons, a lot of them, with sensitive sensors to detect microscopic floating life. Could there be multi-cellular life in the clouds? It would have to stay there, but if it could survive sub-boiling temperatures deep enough into the atmosphere to provide enough “buoyancy” to fly or float…maybe.
Anyway, there are plans to find out: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-54133538
One thing I can say as having a background in biology? Is life is unimaginably robust and creative/adaptable. We’ve discovered living organisms in boiling sulfuric acid pools, under the ocean in total darkness living off not sunlight (which we once thought was essential for life) but chemicals from the Earth. So many places we thought life couldn’t exist, we, to our shock (and sometimes embarrassment) found it. So why not in the clouds of Venus? It will take us years (at least) to confirm this, or not.
Life will do it’s thing, whether I like it, or know it, or not. I actually would love it if true. I love getting answers to questions I never knew to ask. I wish that rush on everyone. It’s not scary, it’s wonderful. I doubt I’ll live long enough to learn “what’s going on in the clouds of Venus” But I can always hope…
Agreed, I find life in Venus’ atmosphere entirely plausible, you’ll find it quite high in Earth’s atmosphere, too. Life on the surface? A bit more of a stretch, but I’d hardly call it impossible.
Really, we ought to launch a floating probe to do long residence time exploration of that planet’s atmosphere, with enough instruments to definitively prove whether life was present.
I agree. A floating probe need not be as robust (translation, expensive) as a probe designed to land on a planet. With recent micro-satellite technology, we could send hundreds, or more. I like it… Any company out there interested in discovering the first extraterrestrial life? Put that in your annual report. How cool is that!
Realistically, a floating probe WOULD be as expensive as one intended to land on a planet; While legs are pretty cheap, and don’t represent much of the mass of a lander, the hardware necessary to keep a probe up in the air would typically dominate your weight budget. And most of the cost IS driven by the amount of mass you have to deliver.
Ideally you could manage some dual function hardware, though: Keep the probe aloft using a hot ‘air’ balloon kept hot by the same isotopic power supply running the probe’s instruments, perhaps.
Though I could argue for a probe in the form of a high altitude glider with that same isotopic power supply driving a propeller; It would have a big advantage in getting around actively and sampling air thanks to moving through it.
Life will find a way!