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Phosphine and Venus. Venus image courtesy Venus Ultraviolet Imager (UVI). JAXA / ISAS / Akatsuki Project Team

December 2020. Phosphine on Venus! (the saga continues)

On September 14^th Nature Astronomy published a paper by Prof. Jane Greaves and her collaborators, including me, on the discovery of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus. See Here for the Greaves et al discovery paper.

This generated a huge amount of press attention. Most of the media were careful to say that a) we had probably detected phosphione and b) it just might be a sign of life. A few went overboard and said that we had found evidence for life on Venus. Alas, a few of our colleagues went overboard and said we had found nothing and were idiots, and we spent most of the days between 15^th September through (as of typing this) 5^th December trying to understand their objections

The issue is that Venus has an atmosphere almost devoid of water and rich in molecules containing oxygen atoms. So it should not make phosphine. Life on Venus seems realyl unlikely too - it is spectacularly dry, hot, acid. So what explains the result? This manuscript is the draft of the paper where we go into detail about how we ruled out a wide range of chemical processes as a source of phosphine on the planet. This page shows our video presentation of the analysis.

This is science in action.