Possible sign of life on Venus
Welcome to my blog "Mystery of Galaxy". Today's topic is" Is phosphine the sign of life on Venus?"
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| Venus Source: Pablo Carlos Budassi / CC BY-SA |
Finding signs of life on other planets beyond the Earth would be away of answering the biggest questions that we've had as a species so far. Where do we come from? Are we alone?
Deep within the acid clouds above Venus, astronomers have
detected something new, a gas that could be a sign of life. The gas is
phosphine, a toxic molecule with an odor of garlic and dead fish. Astronomers
discovered the compound in a cloud layer where temperatures are fairly close to
those on earth's surface. Phosphine is exciting because of where it comes from.
On earth, it's either manufactured by humans, or it's a natural byproduct of
life. It just doesn't show up anywhere else, and there's no human manufacturing
on Venus. Phosphine is not sure fireproof there are alien microbes on the
cloudy planet, but it does mean that something is going on there. Something
that we don't understand.
Here's the backstory. Late last year, a team at MIT put out a paper calling phosphine gas a bio signature, a substance that may come from life on another world. The team argued that phosphine has no abiotic false positives, meaning nothing but life could naturally produce the gas on a rocky planet like earth. They suggested astronomers look for phosphine in the atmospheres of planets orbiting distant stars. Find phosphine and you've maybe found alien life. But this year, an international team, including several researchers at MIT, started looking for phosphine a little closer to home , in the clouds above Venus. They used two telescopes to break apart the light filtering through gases in Venus's atmosphere. By looking at various wavelengths or spectra, as they pass through these molecules, scientists can find fingerprints of the gasses present, and amazingly they found it, a signature line in the spectrum right where phosphine should be. It's a pretty low concentration. One of the researchers described it as "a few tablespoons "in an Olympic-size swimming pool." But that's actually quite a lot compared to what we find on earth. And that may mean that something is actively replenishing the supply. To stress test their find, the team tried to come up with other explanations for the gas. They modeled things like lightning strikes and meteors to see if those events might produce this amount of phosphine. So far, nothing matches up. Now, things could change in the months ahead. It's possible that this signal could be explained by another gas, sulfur dioxide. We'll need more observations to confirm one gas or another. And even if it is phosphine, life may not be the best explanation.
Structure of Phosphine Phosphine looks more or less like this, a phosphorous atom on top, and three hydrogens in the base of this pyramid.
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| Source: NEUROtiker / Public domain |
And phosphine is
an extremely difficult molecule to make. It is only spontaneously made in
extreme environments. Such as what you find in the hellish depths of Jupiter
and Saturn. It is otherwise only made either naturally by life on Earth or
artificially by humans, as a fumigant for example. phosphine is absolutely
unexpected. It cannot be produced on the rocky planets. At least 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. Venetian clouds are a
nightmarish place for life to survive. The clouds themselves are made of
droplets of sulfuric acid. So acidic that they're literally off our pH scale.
Any life we're familiar with would face wrong odds there. And for what it's
worth, there have been other alien false alarms before.
In 1996, researchers found what looked like fossilized bacteria in a Martian meteorite. Then president, Bill Clinton, even gave a speech about it. - If this discovery is confirmed, it will surely be one of the most stunning insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered. - Ultimately that claim did not hold up to scrutiny. So the reaction among plenty of experts right now is curiosity, but caution. But if the evidence remains strong, it would completely change our understanding of what makes a planet habitable. Today, we focus on planets that look a lot like our own, but Venus may tell us we need to expand our search. It would also raise Venus's clout as a place to visit. Mars has gotten a lot more attention over the past few decades, but phosphine could inspire new micro punting missions to the cloudy planet. For now, this detection is just the beginning of a long journey for astrobiologists. There are no definitive answers about the presence of phosphine or the way it's created, or the question of whether or not we're alone in the universe. This is a big story that's sure to generate a lot of hype, so be wary of any "Scientists have Found Aliens on Venus" type headlines. : 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 there is a huge array of possibilities out there in the galaxy of life with different biochemistries and desire. And of course, if we have found life right next door in a planetary neighbor, that would be so cool. Let us know in the comments what you think of this article. And thanks for reading.
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