Did we discover microbial life on Venus?

in #news4 years ago

While browsing Reddit today I stumbled upon this post which talks about a paper that was leaked recently (and is supposed to be officially released soon) which says that phosphine has been discovered in the atmosphere of Venus - which might be a sign of life on Venus.

Before continuing to read, note that this is in no way an evidence of life on Venus and I am also not a scientist just someone who discovered this article and decided to write about it.


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Conditions on Venus

Actually Venus does not offer conditions that you would describe as life-friendly. Venus is the second planet from the sun, it has a very dense atmosphere that traps heat inside the planet which leads to a water-free surface with temperature of 737 K (464 °C; 867 °F). The atmosphere consists of carbon dioxide with clouds of sulfuric acid with barely any water inside. Those conditions don't allow for life to prosper - as you probably guessed.

However there are some regions in the atmosphere that offer Earth-like conditions. Those regions are considered to be potentially habitable by some researchers. In exactly this are the discovery was made.


What does Phosphine imply?

So some astronomers found a special gas in the atmosphere of Venus, but what does this mean? Well, as far as we know there are only two ways to create Phosphine: Certain types of microbes that live in oxygen-free environments produce it and you can create it artificially in laboratories.

You might say that the chemical processes to create the gas just happens coincidentally on the planet, but researchers said that no abiotic process can create the gas is such high amounts. So there is one option left: Microbial life.

Of course another option is that we simply don't understand chemistry enough and that this might be some process unknown to us. Co-author of the paper Janusz Petkowski said about that:

This means either this is life, or it’s some sort of physical or chemical process that we do not expect to happen on rocky planets.

We really went through all possible pathways that could produce phosphine on a rocky planet. If this is not life, then our understanding of rocky planets is severely lacking.


As I said at the beginning of this post I am not a chemist, physicist or any other form of scientist. So I can't say much about this topic aside from the things that I read. I think the chance that we simply don't know the possibility to create Phosphine with the given circumstances of the Venus atmosphere is relatively high.

It would be a huge discovery if we could prove that there is indeed alien life on Venus. It would be so big that it really makes me believe that this simply isn't true and that there is another logical reason for the Phosphine. Maybe microbs that got transported there by us or unknown physical/chemical processes.

In any cases this is a really interesting topic and I'm eager to see more news about it.

This is the leaked article about the research paper: https://archive.vn/L7MT1

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Wirklich sehr interessant, danke fürs Teilen!