Life on Venus?

Flyaway

Flyaway

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From the hints I’ve seen I think this is to do with the possibilities of life in the atmosphere of Venus.

View: https://twitter.com/AAS_Press/status/1303696305055830018


View: https://twitter.com/BBCStargazing/status/1304010713195839493


https://twitter.com/x/status/1303535712231288832
View: https://twitter.com/paulsanderson/status/1303535712231288832
 
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Look up Rocket Lab’s recently announced low cost mission to Venus.
 
There was an accidental leak of the story online so be careful. Though I believe it has now been removed.
 
Blimey the news seems to be leaking all over Twitter! And Twitter have been cleaning it up.
 
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There several theories about life in Clouds of Venus

The first who speculated about this was Carl Sagan
during 1980s the first scientific papers show up, to explain some discrepancy in probe Data compared to the theory about Venus
Like carbon monoxide level in Venus atmosphere or certain light wavelength that is not reflected but absorb by something

i hope that Peter Beck Venus Probes will discover more on that.
 
Michel Van said:
There several theories about life in Clouds of Venus

The first who speculated about this was Carl Sagan
during 1980s the first scientific papers show up, to explain some discrepancy in probe Data compared to the theory about Venus
Like carbon monoxide level in Venus atmosphere or certain light wavelength that is not reflected but absorb by something

i hope that Peter Beck Venus Probes will discover more on that.
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The timing on this first Rocket Lab interplanetary mission seems terrible convenient. I believe it partly springs out of a lunar mission. Whether he heard anything on the grape vine who knows.
 
Announcement is at 16:00 U.K. time.

I hope the media & the public remember that chemical signs possibly indicative of life isn’t the same as saying here is a Venusian microbe.
 
Okaaaaay... seems they have found large amounts of phosphine. Too much to be explained by abiotal process (non-life)... only an ecosystem of tardigrade-lookalike battlehardened extremophiles (remember, the Beresheet tough little critters) could explain it.

Phosphine - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

For the record, phosphine is one of the component of phosgen, a chemical weapon. Pretty nasty stuff for classic life, but then again, extremophiles and Venus have something in common: tough place to live, tough creatures.

Maybe its time to dust off Geoffroy Landis amazing breathable-air floating habitats to go study this critters "in situ".

Also: in your face, planet Mars. And Europa. and Enceladus. "Ha ha, Venus is some kind of insane pressure cooker packed full with acidic compounds, all over the place, how could such shithole harbor life ?"

Venus - Hold my beer.
 
A strong note of caution over this result.

Still, John Carpenter, an ALMA observatory scientist, is skeptical that the phosphine observations themselves are real. The signal is faint, and the team needed to perform an extensive amount of processing to pull it from the data returned by the telescopes. That processing, he says, may have returned an artificial signal at the same frequency as phosphine. He also notes that the standard for remote molecular identification involves detecting multiple fingerprints for the same molecule, which show up at different frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum. That’s something that the team has not yet done with phosphine.
“They took the right steps to verify the signal, but I’m still not convinced that this is real,” Carpenter says. “If it’s real, it’s a very cool result, but it needs follow-up to make it really convincing.”
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Possible sign of life on Venus stirs up heated debate

“Something weird is happening” in the clouds of the planet next door—but some experts are raising doubts about the quality of the data.
api.nationalgeographic.com
 
Here’s the actual paper in Nature.

Phosphine gas in the cloud decks of Venus - Nature Astronomy

The detection of ~20 ppb of phosphine in Venus clouds by observations in the millimetre-wavelength range from JCMT and ALMA is puzzling, because according to our knowledge of Venus, no phosphine should be there. As the most plausible formation paths do not work, the source could be unknown...
www.nature.com
 
Archibald said:
Maybe its time to dust off Geoffroy Landis amazing breathable-air floating habitats to go study this critters "in situ".
Click to expand...

:cool:

Archibald said:
Also: in your face, planet Mars. And Europa. and Enceladus. "Ha ha, Venus is some kind of insane pressure cooker packed full with acidic compounds, all over the place, how could such shithole harbor life ?"

Venus - Hold my beer.
Click to expand...

:D
 
This news is covered on tonight’s edition of The Sky at Night 22:30 UK time on BBC Four.
 
Interesting thread by Professor Jason Wright starting on the link below. It should be noted as he says he hasn’t read the paper itself yet.

View: https://mobile.twitter.com/Astro_Wright/status/1305563683163189249
 
View: https://twitter.com/chrisenorth/status/1305541539972763650


If you want more details, then the research paper is at https://nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1174-4… (which *should* be freely available). It will be on arXiv tonight.

There's an associated paper which is going through the publication process at …https://ef138b75-3870-4e60-a95e-a70.../874d8b_0c6a7490550b475bb03162e68b12f2d2.pdf… (also to be on arxiv later)
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Bit put off by the over level cynicism out there. Of course caution is appropriate but this is still the ‘highest’ level signal ever to my knowledge of life on another planet.
 
The proposed DAVINCI mission to Venus could be useful here as apparently the VTLS instrument onboard is modelled after the tunable laser spectrometer on Curiosity that detected methane on mars at ~20 ppb as well.
 
One aspect that's pretty fascinating to me is the implications: if Venus does turn out to have floating life forms, what's stopping similar things from developing in an appropriate atmospheric layer on one of the gas giants? They've traditionally been strongly dismissed as potential habitats for extraterrestrial life, but IF Venus proves to have the hypothesized microbes, perhaps that view may have to be reconsidered.
 
Trident said:
One aspect that's pretty fascinating to me is the implications: if Venus does turn out to have floating life forms, what's stopping similar things from developing in an appropriate atmospheric layer on one of the gas giants? They've traditionally been strongly dismissed as potential habitats for extraterrestrial life, but IF Venus proves to have the hypothesized microbes, perhaps that view may have to be reconsidered.
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I think it’s because they would have probably developed on Venus’s surface during the period it was habitable & then moved to the skies. The gas giants of course have never had surfaces.
 
now i'm baffle

Phosphine in Atmosphere of Venus
Methane in Atmosphere of Mars
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon in Atmosphere of Titan
Water vapor with traces of simple hydrocarbons venting from Enceladus

we have to overthink the option that in Solarsystem has several site were life exist
 


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