Life on Venus ?
Above , artist ’ s impression of Venus , with an inset showing a representation of the phosphine molecules detected in the high cloud decks .
Phosphine find could be a game changer
By SETH SHOSTAK
If indeed there are living organisms floating in the dense air of
Venus , it would enormously strengthen the argument that life is not a rarity , a cosmic miracle , but is as comman as freckles .
Guest Contributor
It could be atmospheric chemistry . Or pollution from unseen volcanoes . But there ’ s a chance – a not insignificant chance – that scientists have made the first clear discovery of life beyond Earth . Researchers at Cardiff University and MIT , together with colleagues from both British and Asian universities , have just published a paper in the journal Nature in which they claim to have found a smelly , toxic gas – phosphine – high in the thick clouds of the Venusian atmosphere . On Earth , phosphine is produced by certain types of bacteria . This discovery was unexpected , and a potential game changer . The presence of airborne phosphine might be likened to stumbling upon scat in the desert , a signal that life is in the neighborhood .
If indeed there are living organisms floating in the dense air of Venus , it would enormously strengthen the argument that life is not a rarity , a cosmic miracle , but is as common as freckles . For decades , scientists have pursued life in space in three ways . One is to simply find it , the underlying motivation for sending many of the rovers that crawl across Mars . A second is to discover that another world houses intelligent beings by tuning in their radio transmissions . A third scheme – less well known – is to use telescopes to examine the atmospheres of planets and moons for biomarkers : gasses produced by life . A prime example of a biomarker is the oxygen in our own air , the exhaust gas of the photosynthetic life that thrives here . A second is the methane that seems to occasionally waft through the thin air of Mars . Methane , as anyone unfortune enough to live near a garbage dump knows , is a breakdown product of some bacteria .
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