Venus is the brightest object after the moon that you can see gleaming in the night sky. It reflects most of the light that falls across its atmosphere, but it turns out, there’s something really bizarre happening in the Venusian clouds.
A group of scientists has just announced that they detected traces of gas in Venus’s atmosphere that, from what we know about this planet so far, shouldn’t really be there. The scientists were left scratching their heads looking for a reasonable explanation. In the end, they came to a conclusion that this phosphine gas, which is very toxic, is produced by microorganisms.
That doesn’t mean that alien life has been detected, though. At least, not yet. But scientists say the phosphine gas is most likely created by some form of life, or alternatively, it could be a result of a chemical process that they haven’t seen before.
Since Venus is known as one of the most hostile planets in our solar system, scientists believe that if they manage to confirm the “evidence for biology occurring in a place that nothing on Earth could survive in,” it would open totally new horizons for what we know about life.
“It would throw the doors open that a multitude of biological activity could be happening, perhaps all over the Solar System," planetary scientist Helen Maynard-Casely told ScienceAlert.
#7
