Related papers: Venus Phosphine: Updates and lessons learned
On 14th September 2020, the Royal Astronomical Society made an official statement coupled with a webminar on the discovery of phosphine on Venus. Single-line millimetre-waveband spectral detections of phosphine (with a signal-to-noise ratio…
The recent candidate detection of ~1 ppb of phosphine in the middle atmosphere of Venus is so unexpected that it requires an exhaustive search for explanations of its origin. Phosphorus-containing species have not been modelled for Venus'…
The search for life elsewhere in the universe is one of the central aims of science in the 21st century. While most of this work is aimed at planets orbiting other stars, the search for life in our own Solar System is an important part of…
The potential detection of ppb levels phosphine (PH3) in the clouds of Venus through millimeter-wavelength astronomical observations is extremely surprising as PH3 is an unexpected component of an oxidized environment of Venus. A thorough…
We are of the opinion that several anomalies in the atmosphere of Venus provide evidence of yet-unknown processes and systems that are out of equilibrium. The investigation of these anomalies on Venus should be open to the wide range of…
Searches for phosphine in Venus' atmosphere have sparked a debate. Cordiner et al. 2022 analyse spectra from the Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) and infer <0.8 ppb of PH3. We noticed that some spectral artefacts…
Measurements of trace-gases in planetary atmospheres help us explore chemical conditions different to those on Earth. Our nearest neighbor, Venus, has cloud decks that are temperate but hyper-acidic. We report the apparent presence of…
The presence of phosphine (PH$_3$) in the atmosphere of Venus was reported by Greaves et al. (2021a), based on observations of the J=1-0 transition at 267 GHz using ground-based, millimeter-wave spectroscopy. This unexpected discovery…
The detection of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus at an abundance of $\sim 20$ ppb suggests that this gas is being generated by either indeterminate abiotic pathways or biological processes. We consider the latter possibility, and…
Millimeter-waveband spectra of Venus from both the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) seem to indicate there may be evidence (signal-to-noise ratio of about $15\sigma$) of a…
The detection of phosphine (PH3) in the atmosphere of Venus has been recently reported based on millimeter-wave radio observations (Greaves et al. 2020), and its re-analyses (Greaves et al. 2021a/b). In this Matters Arising we perform an…
We propose an abiotic geological mechanism that accounts for the abundance of phosphine detected by Greaves et al., 2020. We hypothesize that trace amounts of phosphides formed in the mantle would be brought to the surface by volcanism, and…
In the light of the recent announcement of the discovery of the potential biosignature phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus I present an independent reanalysis of the original JCMT data to assess the statistical reliability of the…
Recently, phosphine was discovered in the atmosphere of Venus as a potential biosignature. This raises the question: if Venusian life exists, could it be related to terrestrial life? Based on the known rate of meteoroid impacts on Earth, we…
Venus' atmosphere -- specifically its clouds buoyed up 40 to 60 km above the surface -- has long been suspected to encompass a biosphere where Earth-like living organisms could grow and flourish. This idea has been recently rekindled by the…
New analysis is presented of the 1.1 mm wavelength absorption lines in Venus' atmosphere that suggested the presence of phosphine. We retrieve a sulphur dioxide observation from the JCMT archive that was simultaneous within a few days of…
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,…
Venus is Earth's sister planet, with similar mass and density but an uninhabitably hot surface, an atmosphere with a water activity 50-100 times lower than anywhere on Earths' surface, and clouds believed to be made of concentrated sulfuric…
This is a white paper submitted to the Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey. The deep atmosphere of Venus is largely unexplored and yet may harbor clues to the evolutionary pathways for a major silicate planet with implications…
The potential detection of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus has reignited interest in the possibility of life aloft in this environment. If the cloud decks of Venus are indeed an abode of life, it should reside in the "habitable zone"…