News and updates

Venus Phosphine Update June 2023

The Venusian atmospheric phosphine debate continues in 2023. Recently Cordiner et al. (2022) find no phosphine in Venus’ atmosphere, using the airborne SOFIA observatory (1). Professor Jane Greaves and the phosphine team, however, have reanalyzed the SOFIA data and recovered a 5.7 σ candidate detection, at ~3 ppb of PH3…

Phosphine Back and Forth

The reported detection of phosphine (PH3) on Venus has been controversial ever since the original announcement in 2020 (Greaves et al. 2020). Some question whether or not the signal is real. Others find the signal to be real but question the attribution to PH3. Still others assume the signal and…

Venus Life Finder Mission Study

Venus Life Finder Mission Study
The 18-month MIT-led Venus Life Finder Mission Study is now complete. The Venus Life Finder Missions are a series of focused astrobiology mission concepts to search for habitability, signs of life, and life itself in the Venus atmosphere. While people have speculated on life in the Venus clouds for decades, we are…

Venus Phosphine Update

Venus clouds
One year after the announcement of phosphine (PH3) gas in the Venus atmosphere (1), the discovery remains highly controversial. The original PH3 announcement is based on a single-millimeter wavelength absorption line, the PH3 1–0 rotational transition at 1.123 mm wavelength. The spectral feature was observed by two independent facilities, both…

Did Venus ever have oceans?

Imagine our sister planet Venus billions of years ago being an ocean-filled world like Earth is today. The thinking is that at some point Venus underwent a “runaway greenhouse” where the surface became so hot the oceans boiled off, leaving a barren surface too hot for life of any kind.…

Are Venus’ cloud layers too dry for life?

venus life
Scientists have speculated about life in the Venus clouds for over half a century. In theory the conditions for life are met: an energy source, the right temperature for molecules, and a liquid environment. The Venus cloud-layer atmosphere, however, is an incredibly challenging environment for life of any kind. One…

What is the source of PH3 on Venus?

venus volcano
The source of phosphine (PH3) on Venus is unknown. There could be an as yet unknown geochemistry or photochemistry process. Or, there could possibly be life in the Venus cloud layers producing PH3 (1). In a ~100 page paper we review the abiological scenarios and find none that can match…

Venus Phosphine team’s response to criticism regarding the statistical significance and interpretation of the detection of phosphine on Venus.

Venus clouds
The Venus phosphine team posted two preprints on arXiv in response to criticism regarding the statistical significance and the interpretation of the detection of phosphine on Venus. The team addressed some misconceptions about de-trending of spectral baselines, the probability of getting “fake lines” (the probability for such “fake lines” is…

Evidence for Phosphine in Pioneer-Venus Data

Pioneer-Venus
An independent team has revisited archived Pioneer-Venus data and analyzed the gas fragments measured at 51 km altitude. Among the many results is evidence for phosphine gas, primarily by detection of the phosphorus ion (P+). The instrument was a neutral gas “mass spectrometer” which ionizes the gases and subjects them…

ALMA recalibrated Venus data

ALMA
Due to intense and expected scientific scrutiny, the ALMA Observatory carefully checked the data processing and found a problem with the way they used Jupiter’s moon Calisto for the Venus data calibration. For background, most large international observatories (including the Hubble Space Telescope and the NASA TESS mission) provide calibrated…
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