Earlier this year, Kevin Zahnle, a planetary scientist at Nasa’s Ames research facility, was one among the primary people to read a scientific paper that might become the most important space news of 2020. The study, which Zahnle had been asked to give comments on while it was been being considered for publication within the journal Nature Astronomy made two very surprising claims. Firstly, the authors have spotted signs of a gas called phosphine in Venus’s atmosphere. Secondly, they suggested that this gas could be a symbol of life on the uninviting and blisteringly hot planet.
A new analysis hints that there might not be much phosphine on Venus in any case . The announcement made in September about observations of phosphine gas within the Venusian atmosphere sparked excitement due to the likelihood that it could have come from life. But researchers digging through archive data have placed a stringent limit on what proportion of the unexpected gas is really there.
The observations scientists checked out were taken in infrared wavelengths, where we might expect to ascertain signs of phosphine. They found no hint of the gas. the first observations discovered phosphine at concentrations of about 20 parts per billion, but this research team placed a limit at about 5 parts per billion.
Is it because there’s no phosphine? that's possible, on the other hand they need to undertake to work out where the interpretation of the first data went wrong. it's also possible, though, that this is often a clue on phosphine’s distribution in Venus’s atmosphere. The gas is predicted to be quickly destroyed in various parts of the atmosphere, particularly at the cloud tops, which is where the infrared readings were taken. So it's possible these measurements simply didn’t probe deeply enough to identify the phosphine.
It is also possible that the abundance of phosphine across the earth varies over time. If the phosphine came from life, we might expect enormous local variability. On Earth, it comes from living organisms, but it’s still extremely variable. In most of the atmosphere, there’s almost none of it, but above the places where it’s being created, there’s far more .
Overall, these conflicting measurements demonstrate that we'd like much more observations of Venus in many various wavelengths to undertake to probe a greater number of various areas of the atmosphere.

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