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This colorized picture of Venus was taken February 14, 1990, by the Galileo spacecraft from a distance of almost 1.7 million miles. It has been colorized to a bluish hue to emphasize subtle contrasts in the cloud markings.
Astronomers recently found a tantalizing hint that life could be wafting through the clouds shrouding Venus. But it seems the hunt for extraterrestrial life is far from over, as new research is already calling that discovery into question.
The detection of phosphine gas in Venus’s atmosphere, announced last month, ignited a firestorm of speculation about whether the gas could be produced by alien microbes on the planet, where NASA is currently considering sending a spacecraft. However, three independent studies now have failed to find evidence of phosphine in the Venusian atmosphere.
One of the groups used archival observations to search for signs of the gas in the planet’s clouds, and didn’t find it.
“They’re saying they don’t see the phosphine. That’s really problematic,” says Conor Nixon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who did not participate in the analysis. The study has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Two other groups reprocessed the discovery team’s original data and also couldn’t find evidence for phosphine.
But detecting a faint signal from a specific molecule...
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