Life on Venus! Is there life on Venus?
Venus has been an under-ranked planet in our solar system. Not much effort has been provided to find life on Venus. If you rank the most habitable places in our solar system, Venus lands pretty low with surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead and sulfuric acid rain and yet it may have just jumped to the front of the pack. In fact, we may have detected the signature of alien life, Venusians life, for the very first time.
Announcement of a chemical marker of biology in the atmosphere of Venus. NASA has invested far more effort into orbiters Landers and rovers on Mars than Venus. The reason for this is simply the surface temperature is a scorching 460 degrees Celsius enough to melt lead and it has a surface pressure similar to that as being a kilometre underneath the ocean.
So there may be a question struggling on your head.
How the healing life could survive in the temperature that hot. So, instead of searching for life on the surface of the planet. Scientists searched for life 50 kilometres above into the clouds where the pressure drops and the temperatures become comparable to that of earth, something like 30 to 80 degrees Celsius.
Deep within the clouds of Venus, astronomers have detected something new, that could be a sign of life. The gas Phosphine, a toxic molecule with an odour of garlic and dead fish.
So a group of scientists, led by Jane Greaves from the University of Cardiff, were looking for signs, for chemical signs on Venus, that shouldn't belong there. And one of such molecules is phosphine. When we actually looked at all kinds of processes, chemical and physical, that could potentially produce phosphine in Venusian environments. This is an atmosphere. The surface of the planet is completely, completely uninhabited. The atmosphere is the only place in which life actually could in principle exist. There is a belt of clouds. And we concluded that there is no known chemical and physical process that could conceivably produce phosphine. So this adds to the mystery of Venus. And then, this opens a rather bold possibility that there might be something living in the clouds of Venus.
Phosphine looks more or less like this, a phosphorous atom on top, and three hydrogens in the base of this pyramid. phosphine is an extremely difficult molecule to make.
It is otherwise only made either naturally by life on Earth or artificially by humans,.
So the question is why it is actually a staggering discovery. Why it is so important?
we don't know of any known processes, chemical or physical, that can produce phosphine. Which means, either our understanding of the physics and chemistry of the rocky planets is severely incomplete, or there is some chemistry, that is so unbelievably weird, that it could even be life.
If we have indeed found life outside the Earth, it puts our own existence into perspective. But it also tells us that life would be much more common than we first imagined. And of course, if we have found life right next door in a planetary neighbour, that would be so cool.
