More Signs of Life Detected In Venus’s Clouds, Along With Ammonia

Four years ago, the unexpected discovery in the clouds of Venus of a gas that on Earth signifies life — phosphine — faced controversy, earning rebukes in subsequent observations that failed to match its findings, Jacopo Prisco reported for CNN.

The data, the researchers say, contain even stronger proof that phosphine is present in the clouds of Venus.

Now, the same team behind that discovery has come back with more observations, presented for the first time on July 17 at a Royal Astronomical Society meeting in Hull, England.

Eventually, they will form the basis of one or more scientific studies, and that work has already started.

The data, the researchers say, contain even stronger proof that phosphine is present in the clouds of Venus, our closest planetary neighbor

Sometimes called Earth’s evil twin, the planet is similar to ours in size but features surface temperatures that can melt lead and clouds made of corrosive sulfuric acid.

The work has benefited from a new receiver installed on one of the instruments used for the observations, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, giving the team more confidence in its findings.

“There’s also a lot more of the data themselves,” said Dave Clements, a reader in astrophysics at Imperial College London. “We had three observation campaigns and in just one run, we got 140 times as much data as we did in the original detection,” he said.

“And what we’ve got so far indicates that we once again have phosphine detections.” A separate team, which Clements is also part of, presented evidence of another gas, ammonia.