MIT: This Stinking, Toxic Gas Could Be A Sure Sign Of Alien Life
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Scientists think they've found a sure signal of extra-terrestrial life. Phosphine is highly toxic and hails from the bowels of penguins, badgers and fish, among other places that you'd never want to visit. In general, most life-forms that need oxygen like we do stay far away from phosphine. But now scientists at MIT say that phosphine can only be produced in one way: by anaerobic organisms such as bacteria that can thrive without oxygen. This means that if astronomers were able to spot phosphine in the atmosphere of another rocky planet, "it would be an unmistakable sign of extraterrestrial life," according to a release from MIT.
"Here on Earth, oxygen is a really impressive sign of life," explained MIT research scientist Clara Sousa-Silva. "But other things besides life make oxygen too. It's important to consider stranger molecules that might not be made as often, but if you do find them on another planet, there's only one explanation."
Phosphine has been spotted in space, in the atmospheres of gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, as well as in gas jets coming off the comet 67/P visited by the Rosetta spacecraft. But if it were spotted around a more Earth-like planet, it would be a sign of some sort of action below.
Sousa-Silva led a team that spent several years ruling out all possibilities that phosphine could be created by anything else but anaerobic organisms. Their conclusions were published in a paper in the journal Astrobiology in November.
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