Sid PerkinsScientists have detected an unstable and unexpected gas in Venus’s atmosphere that, on Earth, is commonly produced by some microbes.
The find could be a sign of life in the clouds of our nearest planetary neighbor—or, it could merely be evidence of some weird, as-yet-unknown chemical processes taking place there.The gas “is present at levels much higher than can be explained via known methods of production,” says Lewis Dartnell, an astrobiologist at the University of Westminster who was not involved in the new study.Researchers detected a distinctive signature of the gas—phosphine—in the venusian atmosphere in June 2017 using a ground-based telescope.