Venus often called the Earth sister, the neighboring twins are about the same size. But the parallels are there. Being the hottest part of our solar system, Venusan air is filled with carbon dioxide and clouds filled with sulfuric acid that covers its dry, volcanic surface.
That is why it is one of the last places anyone can think of to hunt for life beyond the world.
This is why it came as a surprise last September when a team of scientists, led by Jane Greave of the University of Cardiff, announced their discovery. a possible sign of a strange life in the Venusian atmosphere. In the file of learning, published in Natural Environment, spoke of the presence of phosphine-free carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and realized that there is no definite mechanism to explain its existence. Phosphine can indicate life, he said, by sight recent work and astronomer Clara Sousa-Silva of MIT suggests that the atmosphere may be a biosignature. Globally, phosphine is often found in anaerobic environments, including lakes, wetlands, paddy fields and mudflats.
But when the news reached Jonathan Lunine, an astronomer at Cornell University, he and Ngoc Truong’s graduate student were immediately skeptical. “It’s hard to ask for phosphine as a creature in Venus, because the environment of Venus is so different from the ecosystem,” says Truong. He says that, even in our world, there is some confusion as to whether phosphine is related to life, and he believes that this must be confirmed before he describes this phenomenon as different from ours.
Truong and Lunine were not the only skeptics: After the phosphine announcement, the internet exploded and they discussed the availability. Scientists weighed on the Twitter thread, debated on Facebook posts, and flocked to arXiv.org, a scientific printing press, to develop other ideas on the unnatural elements that can produce phosphine.
Truong, who until then had been studying the ocean at the moon of Saturn, convinced Lunine that he should continue to explore what could be phosphine in particular: the mountains. Their research came to an end new research published Monday in the newspaper Growth of the National Academy of Science. In it, Truong and Lunine paint a picture of how phosphine can make Venus gas. Follow the amount of phosphides (negative phosphorus ions that bind to the metal like iron) found inside the Venus mantle can be dragged ashore by volcanic eruptions. When volcanoes erupt, these phosphides can reach the atmosphere and form sulfuric acid in clouds to form phosphine.
“Our study only shows the method of monitoring volcanic activity” in Venus, Truong says. Two things are required for this to happen. First, the earth must be active. (Although thousands of volcanoes have been observed in photographs of Venus, scientists have no idea of a recent eruption, so far, the place is exposed to extreme heat and pressure from Venusia for about an hour. “And not just for the ‘volcanic eruption in Hawaii,'” says Lunine, who often produces large volcanic eruptions.
Second, scientists need to prove that phosphine does exist — and it does meanwhile the main point of competition. Without this evidence, Lunine states, the theory of volcanic eruptions “becomes a myth instead of a mere figment of our imagination.”
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