Jane Greaves, who has been leading a team of scientists at Cardiff University in Wales, revealed that they have discovered the presence of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus, deeper than they had previously discovered. Greaves made the remarks this week at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting 2023 in Cardiff. In September 2020, his team of scientists reported the discovery of phosphine in Venus’s clouds, which could be a sign of life.
Greaves and her colleagues went further into the planet’s atmosphere using the James Clark Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) at the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii, delved deeper into the planet’s atmosphere, down to the top and even the middle of the clouds present on Venus. The scientists suspected that phosphine was escaping from the planet’s lower atmosphere. Greaves claims that phosphine is produced by bacteria that reside in extremely low-oxygen environments on Earth.
The presence of phosphine in other worlds could be a biosignature
Because of the scarcity of “loose” hydrogen on Earth, she claims that phosphine cannot be produced by any other technique. According to this notion, the presence of phosphine in other worlds could be a biosignature. This is why the finding of phosphine on Venus three years ago created such a buzz. However, the existence of phosphine in Venus’s atmosphere does not necessarily imply that the planet is home to life.
“There’s a big school of thought that you can make phosphine by lobbing phosphorus-bearing rocks up into the high atmosphere and kind of eroding them with water and acid and stuff and getting phosphine gas,” said Greaves, during the meeting.
The scientist discussed how the search for phosphine in Venus’s atmosphere led to the first indication of life on the planet. She claimed that the choice to investigate Venus was decided after studying other planets such as Saturn and improved telescope technology allowed for the probing of smaller planets’ atmospheres.
“I vaguely remembered Venus is supposed to have this potential habitat in the high clouds, which is anaerobic, and we eventually got telescope time, so I thought, ‘Why don’t we have a very quick look and see if there are some phosphates in Venus clouds, an analogue to things living on the surface of the Earth?'” said Greaves, adding, “Astonishingly, we found it, and all hell broke loose!”