Signs of Life on Venus Hint at Biology Pretty Much Anywhere in the Universe

To go to Venus is to go to hell. One of the most brilliant and beautiful objects in the night sky, Venus is a near twin of Earth in size and mass but it is radically different in almost every other way. Its surface temperature averages 470º C (880º F), or hot enough to melt lead. Its atmosphere is 96% carbon dioxide, with a ground-level pressure 90 times greater than that on Earth—the equivalent of being under 914 m (3,000 ft.) of water. Spacecraft that descend through the Venusian atmosphere can make much of the trip without a parachute, descending like a marble in a can of house paint. This is not—it needn’t be said—a place that could likely harbor life. Except that now it very much needs to be said that it looks like it might. That astonishing possibility arose out of observations made by the James Clerk Maxwell telescope in Hawaii and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert, and published yesterday in Nature Astronomy. The study’s authors, led by Cardiff University astronomer and professor Jane Greaves, did not find life itself. What they found instead were significant quantities of the toxic gas phosphine, which is a known byproduct of microorganisms that thrive in anaerobic environments—or those lacking free oxygen. In theory, the gas could be produced by volcanoes or the interaction of lightning with the atmosphere, but the concentrations in which the researchers found the...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: news