Strange chemical in clouds of Venus defies

explanation. Could it be a sign of life?

By Meghan Bartels, Space.com on 09.22.20
Word Count 1,760
Level MAX

The planet Venus, seen from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Akatsuki probe in May 2016. A report released on September 14,
2020, says astronomers have found a potential signal of life high in the atmosphere of our nearest neighboring planet. Photo: Jane
Greaves/Cardiff University/JAXA via AP

Discovering life beyond Earth may well start with a sniff, a whiff of some chemical that scientists
struggle to explain without invoking a strange, shadowy microbe. That first step has happened on
Mars and on a few distant moons, and now, scientists suggest, on Venus.

A team of astronomers announced on September 14 that it has spotted the chemical fingerprint of
phosphine, which scientists have suggested may be tied to life, in the clouds of the second rock
from the sun. The finding is no guarantee that life exists on Venus, but researchers say it's a
tantalizing find that emphasizes the need for more missions to the hot, gassy planet next door.

"The interpretation that it's potentially due to life, I think, is probably not the first thing I would go
for," Victoria Meadows, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington who was not involved in
the new research, told Space.com.

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But it is an intriguing detection, she said, and one that emphasizes how we overlook our neighbor.
"We have some explaining to do," she continued. "This discovery especially is just another
reminder of how much more we have yet to learn about Venus."

The new research builds on the idea that, although the surface of Venus endures broiling
temperatures and crushing pressures, conditions are much less harsh high up in the clouds. And
scientists have realized that Earth's own atmosphere is full of tiny life. Suddenly, microbes in the
sweet spot of Venus's atmosphere, where temperatures and pressures mimic those on Earth, don't
seem quite so outlandish.

The Discovery

The scientists behind the new research wanted to look for phosphine. Researchers have recently
wondered whether the chemical could be a good biosignature, a compound astronomers target in
looking for life. It should break down quickly in atmospheres that are rich in oxygen, like those of
Earth and Venus, and on Earth, when it isn't being made by human industrial processes, it seems
to be found near certain kinds of microbes.

Jane Greaves, an astronomer at the University of Cardiff in the United Kingdom and lead author
of the new research, realized that she could use a telescope she knew well to check for it in the
atmosphere of Venus, she told Space.com.

"Looking for it in Venus might be really peculiar, but it's not hard to do and it wouldn't take that
many hours of telescope time," Greaves said she thought at the time. "Why not give it a go?" So on
five separate mornings in June 2017, the astronomers used the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in
Hawaii to stare at Venus.

And then the observations sat around on a computer for a year and a half, Greaves said, without
her managing to find time to study them.

"I thought, Well, just before we throw this away, I'll have a final go at [analyzing the data]," she
said. "There was this line and it just wouldn't go away, and it seemed like it wasn't imaginary
anymore. I was just completely stunned."

That line is one stripe of a spectrum, a chemical barcode that scientists can read in a telescope's
observations of light. Each chemical has its own unique fingerprint of lines and blank spaces;
match enough lines and you can identify a mystery substance.

But the observations in the new research focus on only one of the lines in phosphine's barcode,
Meadows said, so she isn't quite convinced the new findings represent a conclusive identification
of phosphine.

"Until we can go and get another piece of that barcode … we can't discriminate between which
kind of barcode we're looking at," Meadows said. "I think they make a good case for it being
phosphine in there, but I think they don't have what I would consider a slam-dunk detection yet."

The researchers haven't tackled that aspect yet, but Greaves and her colleagues did arrange to use
the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) in March 2019 to look for the
chemical again and make sure the detection wasn't just a telescopic hiccup.

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ALMA gathered a few hours of data, which also revealed more phosphine than the scientists
expected — not a huge amount in the grand scheme of things, but about 20 particles out of every
billion, according to the research.

"I was braced for disappointment, but it was amazing," Greaves said.

That abundance is significantly more phosphine than she had expected to see. The way the
telescopes' observations work, the chemical must have been more than 30 miles (50 kilometers)
above the Venusian surface. That's about the same altitude at which a different recent paper with
some shared co-authors suggests microbial life could survive in spore form.

So Greaves and her colleagues set to work considering what might have created all that phosphine:
Perhaps volcanoes erupting or lightning striking, or perhaps meteors melting in the atmosphere or
winds pulling particles off the planet's surface. But none of these explanations seemed sufficient to
them.

As usual, struggling to make more conventional explanations check out does not mean that
scientists think they've found life. But the possibility of tiny Venusian bugs has gradually become
more plausible — and researchers focused on our neighboring world say that's important, whether
or not there's actual life to find.

"Either it's a mistaken identity but we don't know what the chemical is, or some strange chemistry
that we are not aware of — or biology," Sanjay Limaye, an atmospheric scientist at the University
of Wisconsin, Madison, who wasn't involved in the new research, told Space.com. "It's a question
of if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, do you call it life or not? We won't
know until we go there and find out."

Meet The Mysterious Phosphine

As tantalizing as the detection of phosphine on Venus may be, scientists not involved with the new
research worry that it makes a few big leaps, even before the massive potential implications of a
detection of life.

Some were unconvinced that phosphine was a reliable fingerprint of living organisms. The single
phosphorus molecule surrounded by three hydrogen molecules is, on Earth, a rarity and short-
lived: some industrial processes produce it, and it's affiliated with some types of bacteria living in
particularly strange environments. It quickly transforms in Earth's oxygen-rich atmosphere and
should in that of Venus as well, which is intriguing for scientists looking for alien breath. But the
excitement about phosphine may well be premature.

"The phosphine link to the biological world is very, very faint and needs to be corroborated simply
by going to the lab and doing experiments," Tetyana Milojevic, a biochemist at the University of
Vienna not involved in the new research, told Space.com.

She argues that phosphine has only been found near microbes, not produced by it, and that the
compound seems to be released by the chemical decay of biological material. So before scientists
can use phosphine as a potential biosignature, they need to get into the lab and really understand
whether and how microbes produce phosphine, a process that scientists eyeing Mars completed
for methane long ago.

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Alas, those experiments aren't quite as simple for phosphine, Matthew Pasek, an astrobiologist
and geochemist at the University of South Florida who has worked on phosphorus cycling issues
but was not involved in the new research, told Space.com. "Phosphine is kind of nasty, so we don't
like playing with it, so we don't actually understand how it gets made through natural processes
very well," Pasek said. "It's always been kind of relegated to the background of phosphorus
chemistry."

Greaves said that she's confident phosphine is a biosignature on Earth, but does hope that the
scientific community can take on these sorts of lab experiments and otherwise build on her team's
work.

The idea of phosphine as a biosignature may have another fatal flaw. Venus is now the fourth
planet where scientists have detected phosphine: two gas giants and Earth. The new detection
shows phosphine levels on Venus about equal to those on Jupiter and Saturn. But that's
significantly more abundant — 1,000 times more abundant — than on Earth, Pasek said.

"For the one place that it is likely biological, there's a lot less of it even there," he said. "So it's kind
of weird that if it is biology on Venus, that's a whole lot of phosphine that is generating for weird
reasons."

It is Venus, after all — our mysterious neighbor.

Distance Makes The Science Harder

Greaves and her colleagues plan to continue studying Venus from the ground, although she said
that the coronavirus pandemic has interfered with those observations. Meadows said she hopes for
analysis that would cover some of those other lines in the phosphine barcode. And of course some
of the phosphine investigations can be done right here in laboratories.

But the details of this massive puzzle aren't likely the sort of thing that can be seen clearly from the
surface of Earth. And spacecraft tend to zip around Venus, keeping a safe distance from its hostile
environments. Designing machinery that can withstand its clouds and surface is so difficult that
no spacecraft has ventured into the atmosphere in decades.

"It should implore NASA and other space agencies to look at Venus as a target for astrobiology
investigation, which means they should pump some money into the development of capable aerial
platforms," Limaye said of the new research.

There's no shortage of ideas to choose from when it comes to dreamed-of Venus missions that
could tackle the atmosphere, whether your taste runs to more traditional designs or unorthodox
options like blimps, balloons or commercially built spacecraft.

"It's time to figure out Venus," James Garvin, a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space
Flight Center in Maryland, who wasn't involved in the new research but is the principal
investigator on a Venus atmospheric probe mission that NASA is evaluating, told Space.com. "If
we ignore it too long, we could be missing the forest for the trees, and that would never be good."

He thinks engineering has caught up with the challenges of the Venusian atmosphere.

"The time is ripe for thinking about what the atmosphere is telling us within itself. It's just this
beautiful laboratory next door that has been tough enough that we've ignored it for 35 years,"

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Garvin said. "The atmosphere is kind of calling us, whispering in the night, 'Hey, I may have
something that you should think about.' And we haven't been."

The research is described in a paper published on September 14 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com.

Quiz

1 Which answer choice accurately summarizes how some scientists feel about the apparent detection of phosphine's chemical
fingerprint on Venus?

(A) Jane Greaves is encouraged by her team's findings and wants others to build on them. Sanjay Limaye
thinks it means that space agencies should spend more to investigate Venus. Tetyana Milojevic does
not believe the evidence is strong enough to conclude that phosphine is a sign of life on Venus.

(B) Jane Greaves is excited with her team's findings and is certain that it is proof of life on Venus. Sanjay
Limaye thinks that Greaves should do more research even though the initial findings are interesting.
Tetyana Milojevic believes the evidence is sufficient to claim that microbes created the phosphine on
Venus.

(C) Jane Greaves is surprised by her team's findings and plans to do more testing before making any
claims. Sanjay Limaye thinks that space agencies should be wary about putting resources into exploring
Venus based on the findings. Tetyana Milojevic is concerned that there is not enough proof to say that
the gas detected by Greaves is phosphine.

(D) Jane Greaves is hesitant to get excited by her team's findings, but she is cautiously optimistic. Sanjay
Limaye is skeptical about phosphine being a biosignature and is calling for other teams to confirm
Greaves's findings. Tetyana Milojevic is fascinated by the discovery and is eager to learn how it relates
to her work with phosphine.

2 Which of the following ideas did the author develop the LEAST in this article?

(A) the connection between the presence of phosphine and the possibility of life on Venus

(B) the reasons why more research needs to be done on the detection of phosphine in Venus's atmosphere

(C) the methods that Greaves and her team used to conclude that Venus has phosphine in its atmosphere

(D) the effects that the coronavirus pandemic has had on Greaves's observations of Venus's atmosphere

3 Read the following sentence from the Introduction [paragraphs 1-5].

The finding is no guarantee that life exists on Venus, but researchers say it's a tantalizing find
that emphasizes the need for more missions to the hot, gassy planet next door.

Which sentence BEST emphasizes what the author means by "tantalizing"?

(A) Discovering life beyond Earth may well start with a sniff, a whiff of some chemical that scientists struggle
to explain without invoking a strange, shadowy microbe.

(B) "The interpretation that it's potentially due to life, I think, is probably not the first thing I would go for,"
Victoria Meadows, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington who was not involved in the new
research, told Space.com.

(C) The new research builds on the idea that, although the surface of Venus endures broiling temperatures
and crushing pressures, conditions are much less harsh high up in the clouds.

(D) Suddenly, microbes in the sweet spot of Venus's atmosphere, where temperatures and pressures mimic
those on Earth, don't seem quite so outlandish.

This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com.

4 Read the following sentence from the section "The Discovery."

"I think they make a good case for it being phosphine in there, but I think they don't have what I
would consider a slam-dunk detection yet."

What does the phrase "slam-dunk detection" convey in the sentence?

(A) the sense that Meadows believes the findings are unexpected and will lead to interesting conclusions

(B) the sense that Meadows believes the findings need more evidence to be considered as definitive proof

(C) the sense that Meadows is excited by the findings and wants to do more research with Greaves

(D) the sense that Meadows and other scientists are jealous that Greaves and her team found phosphine
first

This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com.