Last month, the science world was stunned and excited when Nature Astronomy published a paper indicating that the atmosphere of Venus appeared to contain trace amounts of phosphine, a gas associated with anaerobic bacteria on Earth that would be near-impossible to produce in any other fashion on Venus. However, the TEXES spectrographic data looked at the cloud tops of Venus, …
The story so far: An international team of astronomers led by Jane S. Greaves of Cardiff University and University of Cambridge, U.K., has announced the discovery of traces of a molecule known as phosphine on Venus. Professor Greaves first observed phosphine on Venus using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in the Mauna Kea observatory in Hawaii in 2017. The detected …
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has called for prioritising Venus after astronomers detected sign of alien life in the atmosphere of the planet. The discovery of phosphine, a by-product of anaerobic biology, is the most significant development yet in building the case for life off Earth,” Bridenstine said in a tweet on Monday. “About 10 years ago NASA discovered microbial life …
Nothing about 2020 surprises us anymore. Scientists said on Monday that they have detected in the harshly acidic clouds of Venus, a gas called phosphine, that indicates microbes may inhabit Earth’s inhospitable neighbour, a tantalizing sign of potential life beyond Earth. It also means that life itself must be very common, and there must be many other inhabited planets throughout …
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