Venus May Be Able To Support Life, New Atmospheric Evidence Suggests (space.com) 42
New preliminary evidence for phosphine and ammonia in Venus's atmosphere deepens the mystery of their origins, suggesting the possibility of a biological source. The detections, made using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope and the Green Bank Telescope, point to potential microbial life in Venus's clouds despite the planet's extreme surface conditions. Space.com reports: The new detections of phosphine and ammonia were obtained by a team led by Jane Greaves of the University of Cardiff using submillimeter radio wavelength data collected by the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. "We don't know how you make phosphine or ammonia in an oxygenating atmosphere like that of Venus," said team member and astrophysicist Dave Clements of Imperial College, London, in an interview with Space.com. Then again, it's not clear why biology on Earth produces phosphine, either." Whether it's in penguin poop or badger guts, we don't know why bacteria make phosphine, but they do."
The JCMT's initial detection of phosphine on Venus in 2020 by Greaves and her team was met by fierce disagreement from some quarters. This disagreement focused on how the data was processed and whether that was creating spurious signals since observations by other telescopes struggled to detect the phosphine. Clements said those technical disagreements have now been resolved and that the latest measurements, using a new detector on the JCMT called Namakanui (meaning 'Big Eyes' in Hawaiian), have come from three observing campaigns, each providing 140 times as much data as the initial detection. [...]
Clements is open to the possibility that both phosphine and ammonia are being produced by some rare photochemistry in Venus' upper atmosphere involving solar ultraviolet breaking up molecules and allowing phosphine and ammonia to form from the molecular debris. If that is the case, nobody has observed this process yet, not even in the laboratory. Another possibility that has been mooted is that the phosphine could be produced by Venusian volcanoes. Clements also pointed out that the European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) is making a fly-by of Venus in August 2025 to help slingshot it towards the Jovian system. JUICE carries instruments capable of detecting phosphine and ammonia, but there's no guarantee that its instruments will be switched on and deployed at Venus.
The JCMT's initial detection of phosphine on Venus in 2020 by Greaves and her team was met by fierce disagreement from some quarters. This disagreement focused on how the data was processed and whether that was creating spurious signals since observations by other telescopes struggled to detect the phosphine. Clements said those technical disagreements have now been resolved and that the latest measurements, using a new detector on the JCMT called Namakanui (meaning 'Big Eyes' in Hawaiian), have come from three observing campaigns, each providing 140 times as much data as the initial detection. [...]
Clements is open to the possibility that both phosphine and ammonia are being produced by some rare photochemistry in Venus' upper atmosphere involving solar ultraviolet breaking up molecules and allowing phosphine and ammonia to form from the molecular debris. If that is the case, nobody has observed this process yet, not even in the laboratory. Another possibility that has been mooted is that the phosphine could be produced by Venusian volcanoes. Clements also pointed out that the European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) is making a fly-by of Venus in August 2025 to help slingshot it towards the Jovian system. JUICE carries instruments capable of detecting phosphine and ammonia, but there's no guarantee that its instruments will be switched on and deployed at Venus.
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What is really going on here is that you read something on the intertubes and thought it was twoooo.
Don't mod Samantha down . . . (Score:2, Funny)
. . . it's not her fault. She probably is suffering some cognitive impairment due to covid infection, another tragedy that probably could've been avoided by simply wearing a mask and almost certainly prevented by vaccination.
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Because developing medications is completely free so the only thing left is embezzlement for the money to go to.
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Vaccines are like weed. You can't die from them no matter how hard you try.
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You need to be a bit more serious. There have been vaccines that have had a high fatality rate. High, of course, is a relative term, but there have been vaccines that it was reasonable to gamble on not taking. (Transfusions also used to be frequently lethal.)
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There have been vaccines that have had a high fatality rate.
Nope. No one has died from the vaccine itself. They died because of effects of the vaccine. Just like weed. People die from the effects of th weed, not the weed itself.
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Nope. No one has died from the vaccine itself. They died because of effects of the vaccine.
That's the most useless statement ever. Can also say the following:
I really hope that you were just trolling and I got sucked in :)
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mRNA is not a vaccine despite being labeled as a vaccine
Correct. mRNA is not a vaccine.
messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) is a single-stranded molecule of RNA that corresponds to the genetic sequence of a gene, and is read by a ribosome in the process of synthesizing a protein.
And no one ever said it was.
Just wait until they find out that... (Score:4, Funny)
Just wait until they find out that men really are from Mars and women really are from Venus.
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Why wouldn't she support life? Microbes don't care if she has lost her arms.
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Venus gets hot enough to melt lead, it exerts a pressure 100x more than normal, it continuously rains down burning sulphuric acid.
Venus sure sounds like a place women would come from.
Meh. (Score:5, Informative)
Phosgene and ammonia are very simple compounds. COCl2 and NH3, respectively.
Venus has very complicated atmospheric chemistry. Arguably the second most complicated in the solar system, after Titan. And it doesn't even take very complex chemistry to produce these compounds. Phosgene is mass produced via CO + Cl2 over a carbon catalyst at elevated temperatures (do you even need the carbon catalyst over geological timeperiods? Also FeCl3 is used as a catalyst in some phosgene reactions and is speculated to be in Venus's atmosphere - not that there can't also be free carbon from e.g. photodissociation or lightning) and is naturally produced in our atmosphere from UV on organochlorides - but there's many other ways to produce it. Volcanoes on Earth emit some carbon tetrachloride, and that can be converted to phosgene with fuming sulfuric acid (and yes, Venus has free SO3). I wouldn't be surprised if the highly hygroscopic atmosphere, with H2SO4 and SO3, could drive many other phosgene conversion reactions as well. Maybe even in some conditions reverse the phosgene-water reaction (COCl2 + H2O -> CO2 + 2 HCl).
Ammonia's production means are too numerous to even begin to list (including electrochemical - Venus very much has lightning), is common in space, and is also found on planets where few are speculating life (including the atmospheres of the gas giants and ice giants, where it commonly forms clouds).
Don't attribute to life what there's simpler explanations for.
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TFS and TFA say phospine (PH3) not phosgene. Still a very simple compound, though.
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ED: sorry, poor reading comprehension - this is about phosphine, not phosgene. Hardly a material difference, though - it's an even simpler molecule (PH3), and even easier to produce.
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Phosphine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphine): PH3, not to be confused with Phosgene (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosgene) (COCl2).
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Life as we know it requires an energy gradient and liquid water and some kind of environment in which reactions can happen fairly gently. Life's delicate.
Acid, heat, and pressure below. Acid and ionizing radiation above. No water beyond trace amounts anywhere. Not much to keep anything at a specific altitude where conditions might be 'optimal'. For me, that's enough to put life in Venus's upper atmosphere at the bottom of the list of explanations for the presence of a simple gas.
"Life's delicate" (Score:2)
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I'd put it pretty far down, but I seem to recall that at some levels of the atmosphere there were signs of ice. Maintaining the proper height is what seems to me the main problem...well, that and ever getting started. IIRC there were relatively serious plans to study the idea of creating a strain of algae that would live in Venus' atmosphere at a certain height. That's clearly premature, but it appears that there weren't grounds to just totally rule it out.
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Venus may have been similar to the Earth 3+billion years ago when the Sun was cooler with conditions such as oceans where life may have arisen.
Unluckily all we can do is speculate as Venus seems to have had a resurfacing event 2-3 billion years back erasing any evidence.
Far out speculation, life started on Venus and migrated out to Earth and Mars
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Venus may have been similar to the Earth 3+billion years ago when the Sun was cooler with conditions such as oceans where life may have arisen. Unluckily all we can do is speculate as Venus seems to have had a resurfacing event 2-3 billion years back erasing any evidence. Far out speculation, life started on Venus and migrated out to Earth and Mars
SCI-FI Day-dream:
Venus: Likely lifeless now, likely supported life at one time. Suffered massive climate trauma and a resurfacing event. Likely scenario: Out of control emissions leading to resource scarcity leading to thermonuclear war on a global level. Good scare tactics to promote the current agenda. Hollywood rating: 9/10
Mars: Lifeless now, likely supportive of life at one time. Secondary colony of Venus. Remained small, sub-optimal climate. Experimentation led to the loss of the magnetosphere and eve
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You forgot the one where the asteroid belt is the broken bits of what used to be a Ringworld-like structure, destroyed through war when the greedy capitalist pigs refused to cowtow to the commies like they should.
Gotta save something for the sequel potential. This has "New Cinematic Universe" written all over it!
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True, but until we actually looked, oceanic volcanic vents seemed a bit unlikely too.
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I don't think so! (Score:1)
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Phosphine does nothing to bacteria, ammonia is food (CO2 as well), and some bacteria thrive at 90 C. Of course 200 C in clouds is still a much higher bar; but is not entirely impossible. Like the title says, it "*may* be able to support life".
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We've seen this movie before (Score:4, Funny)
"Rise of the Planet of Apes" (Score:2)
extremophiles (Score:2)
Given all the extremophiles we have here on earth, that's not even slightly surprising. mars could easily support life. (mercury might be a bit of an ask though) Once life gets going, as long as it's given sufficient time to evolve and adapt to changing conditions, it probably will. It just needs an energy input, it doesn't even need any resources. A colony of organisms could continually recycle the limited available resources in an area indefinitely, as long as energy was always available.
The thing is,
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On the other hand, transpermia is looking less unlikely in light of tests done on the ISS. Tartigrades and a number of bacterial and fungal varieties seem to be able to handle freezing, desiccation, vacuum and radiation for extended time periods, long enough to reach the orbit of Venus. Even if life never arose on Venus it could still have arrived on its own at some point in the last three billion years.
Re: extremophiles (Score:2)
And yet this is the very foundation of evolution: can't have survival of the fittest without competition, else everyone survives and no one gets left behind. The very competing for resources and surviving the current environment is the selective pressure that filters out the fittest. Higher lifeforms consume lower lifeforms as a necessity for obtaining the needed amount of en
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Venus may have been quite Earth like 4 odd billion years back when the Sun was 25%+ dimmer. Another billion years and the Earth may be quite Venus like due to the Sun continuing to get hotter.
nope (Score:2)
Nope. Wrong.
L. Ron Hubbard told us he reincarnated from Venus (Score:1)