Life on Venus? Unexplained Discovery in the Clouds Has Scientists Buzzing

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Life on Venus? Unexplained discovery in the clouds has scientists buzzing:

Something unexpected has been discovered in the cloud decks of our nearest planetary neighbor, Venus. While no one is saying it's aliens just yet, some sort of alien microorganism is on the list of potential explanations for why a chemical that shouldn't be floating around above the planet has been observed there for the first time.

The chemical is phosphine, or PH3, a compound made up of phosphorus attached to three hydrogen atoms. On Earth, certain microbes that thrive in oxygen-free environments, like at a sewage plant, are believed to produce the chemical. The gas is highly toxic to humans and smells like decaying fish.

It was identified in observations of Venus made with telescopes in Hawaii and Chile in 2017 and 2019. Specifically, phosphine was found about 33 to 39 miles (53 to 62 kilometers) above the surface of Venus, a world that is known for being brutally inhospitable, with both extremely hot temperatures and crushing pressures.

[...] Interestingly, however, the altitude where the phosphine was detected is one of the more hospitable areas in the solar system beyond Earth, with temperatures and pressure comparable to the surface of our planet. There is still the problem of the sulfuric acid clouds, however, which would certainly be hostile to much of the life we know, and should also destroy phosphine.

"These are conditions not exactly welcoming to life as we know it," says Brendan Burns, an astrobiologist at the University of New South Wales, Australia.

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