Astronomers
made a giant splash last year when they announced the discovery of substantial
sources of phosphine in the Venus atmosphere. The colorless and odorless gas,
they claimed, could be a possible life sign, as it is often the result of
organic matter breaking down here on planet Earth.
The assumption
remains a bit of a stretch: that clouds in the Venus’s thick, carbon
dioxide-filled atmosphere could harbor lifeforms that also occur to be
resistant to the extremely corrosive droplets of sulfuric acid surrounding
them.
And actually,
other astronomers have also thrown cold water on the assumption, calling out
the possibility of a treating error that throws the data itself into uncertainty.
But now, a
new research is giving new life to the tempting theory. Sulfuric acid, MIT researchers say, could be neutralized by the existence of ammonia, which scientists also
suspect to be present in the planet’s atmosphere credit to the Venera 8 and
Pioneer Venus probe missions in the 1970s.
Ammonia
would start out a long chain of chemical reactions, scientists say that could
turn Venus’ clouds into a hospitable place.
In brief,
“life could be creating its own environment on Venus,” the scientists stated in
their paper, which was acknowledged into the journal Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences.
“Our model
hence predicts that the clouds are more habitable than formerly thought, and
may be inhabited,” the scientists conclude.
The
ammonia gas itself could be the outcome of biological processes, the scientists
suggest, instead of lightning or volcanic eruptions, as has been proposed in
previous research.
“There are
very acidic environments on Earth where life does exist, but it’s nothing like
the Venus’s environment — except life is neutralizing some of those droplets,”
co-author Sara Seager, an astronomer professor at MIT, told in a press release.
0 Comments