China News Service, September 15 reported that astronomers detected trace amounts of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus, the neighbor of the earth.
Phosphine is a poisonous gas on Earth, but this gas is detected in the atmosphere of Venus, which means that there may be life on Venus.
According to reports, the study, written by Professor Jan Greaves of Cardiff University in the United Kingdom and his colleagues, was published in the journal Natural Astronomy on the 14th.
"What happened on Venus was completely unexpected and interesting. A small amount of phosphine gas appeared unexpectedly." Sarah, an astrophysicist, planetary scientist and research co-author of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA Siegel said.
Image source: Screenshot of the official account of the NBC social networking site
In 2017, researchers used the James Clerk Maxwell telescope in Hawaii, and in 2019 used the Atacama large millimeter/submillimeter array to study Venus.
Their data revealed that in the atmosphere of Venus, there are spectral features unique to phosphine traces.
The research team believes that surface sources such as volcanoes, lightning, transport through micrometeorites, or chemical processes occurring in clouds, are potential causes of gas.
But scientists are not sure how phosphine is produced.
Siegel said there are many possibilities left to researchers.
"One of them is that there are some unknown chemicals in the atmosphere, surface or underground of Venus." She said, "We found that this explanation is difficult to accept because of the temperature and pressure range (of Venus) and the hydrogen content of Venus. The fact that it is almost zero means that phosphine is not the natural form of phosphorus. On the contrary, phosphorus should exist in the form of phosphate."
Previously, a 2019 study written by Siegel suggested that phosphine may become a biological feature of life if it can be detected in "large amounts" on rocky exoplanets.
Such a large number may require the cumulative level of future telescopes such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to be able to detect it.
However, studying the atmospheres of rocky planets in the solar system provides a key test platform for understanding the atmospheres of exoplanets or planets outside the solar system, and whether they can support life.
The research team will continue to search for the source of the phosphine gas detected on Venus and look for other gases that may appear unexpectedly in its atmosphere.
Siegel said that the phosphine found on Venus makes it an area worth exploring in our solar system, just like Mars and Enceladus.
"We hope that the impact in the planetary science community will stimulate more research on Venus itself, on the possibility of life in the atmosphere of Venus, and even space missions aimed at finding signs of life in the atmosphere of Venus and even life itself," West Geer said.