“Venus is like Earth in so many ways,” explained the late physicist, Stephen Hawking. “A sort of kissing cousin. She’s almost the same size as Earth, a touch closer to the Sun. And, she has an atmosphere that could crush a submarine.”
Recent research has revealed that Venus might have looked like Earth for three billion years, with vast oceans that could have been friendly to life. “That’s what sets my imagination on fire,” says Darby Dyar, a planetary scientist at Mount Holyoke College with NASA’s Solar System Exploration team, which led her to surmise: “If that’s the case, there was plenty of time for evolution to kick into action,” and conclude that Venus may have been the first habitable planet in the Solar System — “a place where life was just as likely to arise as it was on Earth.”
Will We Learn that Life has Multiple Chemical Origins?
In sync with Darby Dar, Harvard astrophysicist, Avi Loeb wrote in an email to The Daily Galaxy: “Earth’s nearest neighbor, Venus could have hosted life throughout its history. Venus went through a runaway greenhouse effect that heated its surface above the boiling temperature of water. But it maintained an atmosphere which at an elevation of about 50 kilometers resembles the Earth’s lower atmosphere. Is there microbial life in the cloud decks of Venus? The only way to find out for sure is by scooping its material with a dedicated space mission.
“If we do find life on either Venus,” concluded Loeb, “the key question is whether it resembles that on Earth. If not, then we will learn that life has multiple chemical origins.”
Venus Could Have Been Habitable and Radically Different from the Planet We See Today
The “Hellscape” Could Harbor Life Within Its Acidic Clouds
In September of 2020, an international group of researchers reported in the journal Nature Astronomy that there may be a whiff of life in the famously inhospitable planet’s atmosphere in the form of traces of phosphine, a gas that is associated with life where there is no oxygen. On Earth, says Dyar, it’s found “in sewage facilities and in the guts of living animals.”
“The experiment was done meticulously,” said Dyar, who is the Mount Holyoke College Kennedy-Schelkunoff Professor of Astronomy. “The problem is that we haven’t thought too much about whether phosphine can be created abiotically on Venus, in part because we know so little about the planet and its chemistry.”
“Clues to Alien Life” –Billions of Fragments of Venus May Exist on the Moon
Dar and colleagues were in good company, in 1967 Carl Sagan famously hypothesized that microorganisms might exist in the planet’s clouds. “Sagan’s work on Venus was formative, though few today remember his impact,” Dar said. “This finding may be the first of many to come as NASA and other countries renew a Venus exploration program.”
A Red Herring
It now appears that the phosphine hypothesis may actually be a red herring –a clue that is misleading or distracting. “Instead of phosphine in the clouds of Venus, the data are consistent with an alternative hypothesis: They were detecting sulfur dioxide,” said Victoria Meadows, a University of Washington astrobiologist and professor of astronomy. “Sulfur dioxide is the third-most-common chemical compound in Venus’ atmosphere, and it is not considered a sign of life.”
In September, 2020 a team led by astronomers in the United Kingdom announced that they had detected the chemical phosphine in the thick clouds of Venus. The team’s reported detection, based on observations by two Earth-based radio telescopes, surprised many Venus experts. Earth’s atmosphere contains small amounts of phosphine, which may be produced by life. Phosphine on Venus generated buzz that the planet, often succinctly touted as a “hellscape,” could somehow harbor life within its acidic clouds.
First Images of Venus’ Surface in Visible Light (NASA YouTube Video)
Reinterpreting the Radio Telescope Observations
Since that initial claim, other science teams have cast doubt on the reliability of the phosphine detection. Now, a team led by researchers at the University of Washington has used a robust model of the conditions within the atmosphere of Venus to revisit and comprehensively reinterpret the radio telescope observations underlying the initial phosphine claim. As they report in a paper accepted to the Astrophysical Journal and posted Jan. 25 to the preprint site arXiv, the U.K.-led group likely wasn’t detecting phosphine at all.
The team behind the new study also includes scientists at NASA’s Caltech-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the NASA Ames Research Center and the University of California, Riverside.
Sulfur Dioxide –“More Consistent”
The UW-led team shows that sulfur dioxide, at levels plausible for Venus, can not only explain the observations but is also more consistent with what astronomers know of the planet’s atmosphere and its punishing chemical environment, which includes clouds of sulfuric acid. In addition, the researchers show that the initial signal originated not in the planet’s cloud layer, but far above it, in an upper layer of Venus’ atmosphere where phosphine molecules would be destroyed within seconds. This lends more support to the hypothesis that sulfur dioxide produced the signal.
Both the purported phosphine signal and this new interpretation of the data center on radio astronomy. Every chemical compound absorbs unique wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, which includes radio waves, X-rays and visible light. Astronomers use radio waves, light and other emissions from planets to learn about their chemical composition, among other properties.
In 2017 using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, or JCMT, the U.K.-led team discovered a feature in the radio emissions from Venus at 266.94 gigahertz. Both phosphine and sulfur dioxide absorb radio waves near that frequency. To differentiate between the two, in 2019 the same team obtained follow-up observations of Venus using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA. Their analysis of ALMA observations at frequencies where only sulfur dioxide absorbs led the team to conclude that sulfur dioxide levels in Venus were too low to account for the signal at 266.94 gigahertz, and that it must instead be coming from phosphine.
In this new study by the UW-led group, the researchers started by modeling conditions within Venus’ atmosphere, and using that as a basis to comprehensively interpret the features that were seen — and not seen — in the JCMT and ALMA datasets.
Rediscovering Venus -NASA’s New Missions to Discover if Venus was the First Habitable Planet in the Solar System
The Radiative Transfer Model
“This is what’s known as a radiative transfer model, and it incorporates data from several decades’ worth of observations of Venus from multiple sources, including observatories here on Earth and spacecraft missions like Venus Express,” said lead author Andrew Lincowski, a researcher with the UW Department of Astronomy.
The team used that model to simulate signals from phosphine and sulfur dioxide for different levels of Venus’ atmosphere, and how those signals would be picked up by the JCMT and ALMA in their 2017 and 2019 configurations. Based on the shape of the 266.94-gigahertz signal picked up by the JCMT, the absorption was not coming from Venus’ cloud layer, the team reports. Instead, most of the observed signal originated some 50 or more miles above the surface, in Venus’ mesosphere. At that altitude, harsh chemicals and ultraviolet radiation would shred phosphine molecules within seconds.
Phosphine at Unrealistic Levels
“Phosphine in the mesosphere is even more fragile than phosphine in Venus’ clouds,” said Meadows. “If the JCMT signal were from phosphine in the mesosphere, then to account for the strength of the signal and the compound’s sub-second lifetime at that altitude, phosphine would have to be delivered to the mesosphere at about 100 times the rate that oxygen is pumped into Earth’s atmosphere by photosynthesis.”
The researchers also discovered that the ALMA data likely significantly underestimated the amount of sulfur dioxide in Venus’ atmosphere, an observation that the U.K.-led team had used to assert that the bulk of the 266.94-gigahertz signal was from phosphine.
“The antenna configuration of ALMA at the time of the 2019 observations has an undesirable side effect: The signals from gases that can be found nearly everywhere in Venus’ atmosphere — like sulfur dioxide — give off weaker signals than gases distributed over a smaller scale,” said co-author Alex Akins, a researcher at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Underestimation of Presence of Sulfur Dioxide
This phenomenon, known as spectral line dilution, would not have affected the JCMT observations, leading to an underestimate of how much sulfur dioxide was being seen by JCMT.
“They inferred a low detection of sulfur dioxide because of that artificially weak signal from ALMA,” said Lincowski. “But our modeling suggests that the line-diluted ALMA data would have still been consistent with typical or even large amounts of Venus sulfur dioxide, which could fully explain the observed JCMT signal.”
“When this new discovery was announced, the reported low sulfur dioxide abundance was at odds with what we already know about Venus and its clouds,” said Meadows. “Our new work provides a complete framework that shows how typical amounts of sulfur dioxide in the Venus mesosphere can explain both the signal detections, and non-detections, in the JCMT and ALMA data, without the need for phosphine.”
Volcanic Activity on Venus — “May Have Radically Changed the First Habitable Planet in Our Solar System”
Still a World of Mysteries
With science teams around the world following up with fresh observations of Earth’s cloud-shrouded neighbor, this new study provides an alternative explanation to the claim that something geologically, chemically or biologically must be generating phosphine in the clouds. But though this signal appears to have a more straightforward explanation — with a toxic atmosphere, bone-crushing pressure and some of our solar system’s hottest temperatures outside of the sun — Venus remains a world of mysteries, with much left for us to explore.
The Last Word –“Equivalent to the Air Pressure at the Summit of Mount Kilimanjaro”
“At about 50km up the atmospheric pressure and temperature on Venus is similar to the surface of the Earth,” wrote astrophysicist Ian Whitaker in an email to The Daily Galaxy. “The previous (now disproven) research suggesting increased levels of phosphine at Venus was based on microscopic organisms that we know can briefly live in clouds on Earth. In terms of intelligent life at Venus,” he continued, “there is very little chance of there being anything there currently, but there is the potential for it to be a location we could send a manned mission to. An airship filled of Earth surface pressure air containing the same mix of elements would float at this height, making the conditions to keep people alive a lot easier – particularly as the thick atmosphere will provide some partial radiation protection.”
As surprising as it may seem, the upper atmosphere of Venus is the most Earth-like location in the solar system. Between altitudes of 50km and 60km, the pressure and temperature can be compared to regions of the Earth’s lower atmosphere. The atmospheric pressure in the Venusian atmosphere at 55km is about half that of the pressure at sea level on Earth. In fact you would be fine without a pressure suit, as this is roughly equivalent to the air pressure you would encounter at the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. Nor would you need to insulate yourself as the temperature here ranges between 20°C and 30°C.
The atmosphere above this altitude is also dense enough to protect astronauts from ionising radiation from space. The closer proximity of the sun provides an even greater abundance of available solar radiation than on Earth, which can be used to generate power (approximately 1.4 times greater).
The conceptual airship would float around the planet, being blown by the wind. It could, usefully, be filled with a breathable gas mixture such as oxygen and nitrogen, providing buoyancy. This is possible because breathable air is less dense than the Venusian atmosphere and, as result, would be a lifting gas
Editor’s Note: Interestingly, today’s article exemplifies the scientific process, which often includes continuous debate and attempts to explain evidence in different ways. These debates can sometimes be fierce and long lived, although are usually far away from the public eye. But when words like “life” and/or “aliens” are included, the attention from the public and the media makes the stakes higher. (Avi Shporer).
Image credit: Surface features of Venus seen in the new WISPR images (left) match ones seen in those from the Magellan mission during the 1990s (right). (NASA/APL/NRL, Magellan Team/JPL/USGS via CNN)
Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research via Ian Whitaker, Avi Loeb, University of Washington, Mount Holyoke College, Nature.
Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A Google Scholar, Avi was formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”