Phosphine on Venus: a detection that has not settled down
In 2020 a team reported a gas in the Venusian clouds with no known non-biological source there. Five years of reanalysis later, the community still cannot agree whether the signal is real.
The layer of interest sits about fifty kilometres up, where temperature and pressure are close to those at Earth’s surface.
In September 2020 a team led from Cardiff reported the detection of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus, using two radio telescopes. On Earth phosphine is associated with anaerobic life and industrial processes, and the authors reported no known chemical route that would produce it in Venusian clouds in the quantity observed.
The reception was immediate and the argument since has been unusually instructive.
Why Venus at all
The surface is hot enough to melt lead and the pressure is crushing. But at around fifty kilometres altitude, temperature and pressure are close to terrestrial surface conditions — and that cloud layer has been discussed as a possible habitat since the 1960s.
The clouds are also highly acidic, which is the standing objection to any biological speculation about them.
What happened to the detection
It was challenged quickly and on technical grounds. Reanalyses of the same data with different treatments of the telescope baseline found the feature reduced or absent. Other groups reported non-detections.
The original team responded with reprocessed data and a revised, lower abundance. Further observations have gone both ways. The position as it stands is genuinely unresolved — not "debunked", and not "confirmed".
Complicating it further, sulphur dioxide absorbs near the same frequency, and disentangling the two is exactly the sort of problem where reasonable analysts reach different answers.
The unresolved chemistry
One thing survives regardless of the detection dispute. Nobody has produced a satisfactory account of what would make phosphine on Venus if it is there, and the atmosphere has other chemical oddities — including apparent disequilibrium in sulphur species — that are also unexplained.
Venus is chemically peculiar in ways that predate this argument. That is worth saying, because it means the interest in the planet does not stand or fall with one spectral feature.
Join the discussion
Still open on this one:
- 01
Is the phosphine feature real?
Five years of reanalysis has not converged. This is what a genuinely marginal detection looks like, and it is worth watching for that reason alone.
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Sources
Open them and check for yourself. Where a record is public, it is linked.
NASA
Phosphine gas in the cloud decks of Venus
Greaves et al., Nature Astronomy · 14 Sept 2020 · no public copy located
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