On July 12, last year, the Economic Times reported, that Cardiff University in Wales had made a groundbreaking discovery. A team of scientists has claimed to have found phosphine gas in the planet’s atmosphere. And the gas is crucial to supporting a living.
The same team that made the original discovery has now returned with more observations, which they presented on July 17 at a Royal Astronomical Society meeting in Hull, England. These observations will eventually be used in scientific studies, and the work has already begun.
According to the researchers, the new data provides even stronger evidence that phosphine is present in the clouds of Venus, our closest planetary neighbor. Venus, sometimes called Earth’s evil twin, is similar in size to Earth but has surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead and clouds made of corrosive sulfuric acid.
The team’s work has improved thanks to a new receiver installed on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, which increased their confidence in the findings. “We also have a lot more data now,” said Dave Clements, an astrophysics reader at Imperial College London.
“We had three observation campaigns, and in just one run, we got 140 times more data than we did in the original detection,” he explained. “What we’ve found so far indicates that we have detected phosphine again.”
Another team, which includes Clements, found evidence of another gas, ammonia.
“That discovery might be even more important than finding phosphine,” he added. “We are far from confirming this, but if there is life on Venus producing phosphine, we don’t know why it’s doing so. However, if there is life on Venus producing ammonia, we have an idea why it might need to breathe ammonia.”
How is Phosphine important to life?
“Phosphine is a relatively simple chemical compound — it’s just a phosphorus atom with three hydrogens — so you would think that would be fairly easy to produce. But on Venus, it’s not obvious how it could be made,” said Martin Cordiner, a researcher in astrochemistry and planetary science at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
In other words, phosphine could be an indicator of life. Though common in the atmospheres of gas planets like Jupiter and Saturn, phosphine on Earth is associated with biology. Here, it’s formed by decaying organic matter in bogs, swamps, and marshes.
