• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

The “Phosphine On Venus” Saga Has An Exciting New Twist

August 19, 2022 by Deborah Bloomfield

In September 2020, researchers announced they had found the molecule phosphine in the atmosphere. On Earth, the molecule is linked to biological activity, aka life. Its presence on Venus was not expected and couldn’t be explained. Since then, the debate has raged if the observations were correct, if they showed phosphine in the quantities stated, and if something else might explain it. Team lead Professor Jane Greves has teased a new detection in a radio interview.

Advertisement

In the latest episode of Planetary Radio, the weekly podcast of the Planetary Society, host Mat Kaplan talked to Professor Greaves about the observations of Venus and phosphine. Greaves touches on the stepping stones from the first observations, the announcement, the subsequent debate, and the new observations.

The original observations came from the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile, and were conducted in 2017. A follow-up was conducted in 2020, before the announcement, but was not analyzed until 2021. Again, it showed the phosphine, and were done with a different instrument on the JCMT. Then they discussed the latest observations from last February, showing another detection.

“I haven’t told anyone yet this because I was doing it this morning before speaking to you. But we have a third set of data from the JCMT,” Professor Greaves told Planetary Radio.

“Because on the back of what we had already, they’re allowing us to do what’s called a legacy survey where we can use far, far more telescope time and collect a whole slew of data. My friend there, Dr. Dave Clements at Imperial College here in the UK, is leading that. The whole pile of data from February landed on my computer, which is a very slow computer, and I finally teased out the third detection of phosphine from the JCMT just this morning. So, in fact, your listeners are the first to know that because I haven’t had time to email Dave yet.”

Advertisement

The finding is an intriguing new twist in the phosphine saga. Obviously, it is fresh off the telescope, so we shall have to wait for the full analysis once it is published in a journal. An analysis that Greaves promises to be a lot more insightful.  

“The new JCMT detection provides some extra robustness, as it was a different instrument from the discovery data. It also lets us start checking any variability over time,” Professor Greaves told IFLScience. “Because of that, it will probably be published as part of a bigger work about time changes – we have 4 epochs with detecting now!”

Venus remains a hot topic – and not just because it has a surface temperature high enough to melt lead. It is the target of multiple missions from NASA and the European Space Agency and the debate about phosphine in its atmosphere continues.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Amazon releases a Kindle software redesign to make navigation easier
  2. Chinese envoy to U.S. urges stable commercial ties despite trade conflicts
  3. Golf-U.S. players getting Ryder Cup celebrations started early
  4. The mystery of Elon Musk’s missing gas

Source Link: The "Phosphine On Venus" Saga Has An Exciting New Twist

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • What Alternatives Are There To The Big Bang Model?
  • Magnetic Flip Seen Around First Photographed Black Hole Pushes “Models To The Limit”
  • Something Out Of Nothing: New Approach Mimics Matter Creation Using Superfluid Helium
  • Surströmming: Why Sweden’s Stinky Fermented Fish Smells So Bad (But People Still Eat It)
  • First-Ever Recording Of Black Hole Recoil Captured During Merger – And You Can Listen To It
  • The Moon Is Moving Away From Earth At A Rate Of About 3.8 Centimeters Per Year. Will It Ever Drift Apart?
  • As Solar Storm Hits Earth NASA Finds “The Sun Is Slowly Waking Up”
  • Plate Tectonics And CO2 On Planets Suggest Alien Civilizations “Are Probably Pretty Rare”
  • How To Watch The “Awkward” Partial Solar Eclipse This Weekend
  • World’s Oldest Pots: 20,000-Year-Old Vessels May Have Been Used For Cooking Clams Or Brewing Beer
  • “The Body Is Slowly And Continuously Heated”: 14,000-Year-Old Smoked Mummies Are World’s Oldest
  • Pizza Slices, Polaroid Pictures, And Over 300 Hats: What’s Left Behind In Yellowstone’s Hydrothermal Areas?
  • The Mathematical Paradox That Lets You Create Something From Nothing
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version