SCIENCE COOKIES
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Possibility of life discovered on Venus
Published: 26/9/2020
Author: Andrea Garma
The search for life on planets close to Earth has been a much studied topic and a source of curiosity in recent years, with a focus on the rocky red planet, Mars. However, scientists at Cardiff University have made a discovery that could possibly redirect the search to Venus.
Image credits: NASA
Cardiff University
The Cardiff University science team, led by astronomer Jane Greaves, found a spectral line of phosphane, also known as phosphine, in the clouds of our other neighbor: Venus .
The study has shocked the scientific community, since a reason that could justify the presence of this gas on a planet with such extreme characteristics is nothing less than the existence of microorganisms in the air, that's right ... Life on Venus!
Telescopes
The researchers obtained those results by doing studies at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii and the Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. But the phosphane subject doesn't end there. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a team led by scientists Bains and Petkowski, did multiple tests and scenarios that could lead to the production of said chemical and concluded that it could not be anything other than the possibility of a microorganism in the atmosphere.
"This phosphane signal is perfectly positioned where others have surmised that it is a habitable zone," Petkowski said.
Image credits: NASA
References
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