An international research team led by Britain has concluded that the clouds on Venus are “too dry” to create a chance for life.
Last year, there was hope that the presence of phosphine (PH3) in the venous atmosphere might indicate the presence of microbes, because geological activity alone does not explain the gas’s concentration, the BBC news portal wrote.
A study by Queen’s University Belfast, published in a recent issue of the journal Nature Astronomy, considers life is not possible in the atmosphere of Venus. The researchers evaluated all there was to know about clouds based on samples taken in space, then analyzed the literature on terrestrial life forms to see if there was an organism that could live in the midst of clouds composed mostly of sulfuric acid and very little water.
They concluded that even so-called hypersensitive microbes, trained in the harshest conditions, would not survive this challenge.
We didn’t find that the proportion of water molecules was just a little less than enough for the most resistant microbes on Earth, but it’s a hundred times smaller.
said John Hallsworth, a university biologist.
On Earth, phosphine is associated with life, the microbes in the intestines of animals, including penguins, or oxygen-poor environments such as swamps. It can also be produced synthetically, but there is no such thing on Venus, so the signs of phosphine must be explained. Jane Greaves, a researcher at Cardiff University, has raised the possibility of Venus for the existence of life. Some astronomers initially questioned the validity of the observations, but the research team at the University of Belfast’s doubts came from a different direction, from a biochemical point of view.
