OK, Chelsea, I'm kind of tired of being the doom and gloom person. I don't want it to be negative news. So generally, I'm talking about the destruction of life on our planet. Well, guess what? CNN.com article posted January 29, 2024, written by Jacopo Prisco. That's quite the first name. You know what Jacopo's? Oh, I don't know. Actually, I think I know too many Jacopos. Yeah, OK. Like 10 of them. OK. That's interesting. I've never had that problem. Anyhow, name of the article.
The discovery of a possible sign of life in Venus's clouds sparked controversy. Now, scientists say they have more proof. Four years ago, the unexpected discovery in the clouds of Venus of a gas that on Earth signifies life. Phosphine face controversy, earning rebukes in subsequent observations that failed to match this finding.
Now, the same team behind that discovery has come back with more observations presented for the first time on July 17th at Royal Astronomical Society meeting in Hall, England. Eventually, they will form the basis of one or more scientific studies. And that work has already started. The data, the researchers say, contains enough strong proof that Phosphine is present in the Venus clouds, our closest planetary neighbor.
Sometimes called Earth's evil twin, the planet is similar to ours in size, but features surface temperatures that can melt lead and clouds made of corrosive sulfuric acid. The work has benefited from a newer receiver installed on one of the instruments used for the observations, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, giving the team more confidence in its findings. Quote, there is also a lot more of the data itself.
And quote, said David Clements, a reader in astrophysics at Imperial College London. Quote, we have three observations, campaigns, and in just one run, we got 140 times as much data as we did in the original detection. And what we've got so far indicates that we once again have Phosphine detections. This is arguably more significant than the discovery of Phosphine. We're a long way from saying this, but if there is life on Venus producing Phosphine, we have no idea why it's producing it.
However, if there is life on Venus producing ammonia, we do have an idea why it might be wanting to breathe ammonia end quote from the same guy. On Earth, Phosphine is a foul smelling toxic gas produced by decaying organic matter or bacteria. While ammonia is a gas with a pungent smell that naturally occurs in the environment and is also produced mostly by bacteria at the end of the process of decomposition of plant and animal waste.
Quote, Phosphine has been discovered in the atmosphere of Saturn, but that's not unexpected because Saturn is a gas giant. There is an awful lot of hydrogen in its atmosphere. So any hydrogen based compounds like Phosphine or ammonia are what dominate there end quote said Clements. However, rocky planets such as Earth, Venus and Mars have atmospheres in which oxygen dominates the chemistry because they didn't have enough mass to keep the hydrogen that they had when they originally formed.
And that hydrogen has escaped. Finding these gases on Venus is therefore unexpected quote by all normal expectations, they shouldn't be there, Phosphine and ammonia have both been suggested as biomarkers, including on exoplanets. So finding them in the atmosphere of Venus is interesting on that basis as well. When we published the Phosphine findings in 2020, quite understandably, that was a surprise end quote by Clements again.
Subsequent studies challenged the results suggesting that the Phosphine was actually ordinary sulfur dioxide data from instruments other than those used by Clements team such as Venus Express spacecraft. The NASA infrared telescope facility and the now defunct Sophia airborne observatory also failed to replicate the Phosphine findings.
But Clements said that his new data coming from Atacama large millimeter submillimeter array or ALMA rules out that sulfur dioxide might be a contaminant and the lack of Phosphine from other observations is due to timing. Quote, it turns out that all our observations that check with Phosphine were taken as the atmosphere of Venus move from night to day. And all the observations that didn't find Phosphine were taken as the atmosphere move from day to night end quote from Clements again.
During the day, the ultraviolet light from the sun can break up molecules in the upper atmosphere of Venus. Quote, all Phosphine is baked out and that's why you don't see it. End quote Clements said adding that the only exception was the stratospheric observation for infrared astronomy, which made observations at night. But further analysis of that data by Clements team revealed weak traces of the molecule reinforcing the theory.
It showed Phosphine inside the clouds of Venus at around the part per million level, which is exactly what we have largely been detecting. So it's beginning to hang together, but we still don't know what's producing it. Thank Clements. And I think that's a good place to stop it there, Chelsea. Anything you want to say? Think it's dinosaurs? You know what? They're actual specifically.
You know what, if it is going to be any dinosaurs, it is pterodactyls because I don't know if we've talked about this on the podcast before, but the best speculation for life on Venus is that it's flying in the atmosphere. So if it's going to be a dinosaur, it's got to be a pterodactyl or at least some sort of floating p-rax. And then we just got to get used to the idea that the Venetians are pterodactyls. No one thought of that. No one thought of that.
I don't know what the implications are with that either. We like look. Have we looked into Venus like what's going on on the surface or is too gassy? Well, we haven't really. And it's really weird because it's the closest planet to us. Like Mars is actually further away by a significant amount. There's only been one probe ever sent to Venus. And there's basically like two photos that came back from it because it got destroyed on the way to landing.
I was going to say it's probably pretty turbulent in there. It's not only turbulent. It's incredibly acidic atmosphere. It is the warmest planet in the solar system and the pressure is just killer. So anything that lands there is promptly going to be destroyed. Really? Yeah. I bet it's on pterodactyls, but it's looking more and more like there's probably life even within our solar system.
And heading back a few fringing minis ago, I wasn't going to say Venus because now we know there's pterodactyls. But second runner up is anything with an ocean because apparently they have large stores of oxygen. Yes, due to the electricity that happens in there. Yeah. Therefore electricity.
Well, and there's an incredibly interesting history, too, to Venus of people seeing weird lights in the sky of Venus or the clouds of Venus is probably a better way to say it, like astronomers through the last 200 years have seen weird lights in the clouds of Venus, which can be explained through something living in the atmosphere. Well, that's pretty cool. Who said that? I would have to go look at it, but it's many like famous astronomers that have seen lights in the clouds. Oh, that's cool.
Yeah. OK. I would have to make a whole episode out of that, though. Pterodactyls are wearing like those hard hats with lights on. I like to think they're having raves in the night sky and they're just. Yeah, like yeah. Yeah. OK. But anyhow, you you you got 48 hours to figure out what those pterodactyls are doing in the night sky there. You can publish your thesis, you know, send us your thesis before you publish it just so that we can make sure we're on the same page.
But anyhow, you got 48 hours. We'll see you at the next episode. Bye. Bye.