Recently in the Venus Category

Terrestrial exoplanets orbiting within or near their host stars' habitable zone are potentially apt for life. It has been proposed that time-series measurements of reflected starlight from such planets will reveal their rotational period, main surface features and some atmospheric information.

We first respond to two points raised by Villanueva et al. We show the JCMT discovery spectrum of PH3 can not be re-attributed to SO2, as the line width is larger than observed for SO2 features, and the required abundance would be an extreme outlier.

On 13 November Moa Persson, Swedish Institute of Space Physics (IRF) and Umeå University, will defend her doctoral thesis. Her thesis shows that only a small part of the historical water content on Venus has been lost to space over the past 4 billion years. This is much less than researchers previously thought.

The detection of phosphine (PH3) has been recently reported in the atmosphere of Venus employing mm-wave radio observations (Greaves et at. 2020). We here demonstrate that the observed PH3 feature with JCMT can be fully explained employing plausible mesospheric SO2 abundances (~100 ppbv as per the SO2 profile given in their figure 9), while the identification of PH3 in the ALMA data should be considered invalid due to severe baseline calibration issues.

Context: ALMA observations of Venus at 267 GHz have been presented in the literature that show the apparent presence of phosphine (PH3) in its atmosphere. Phosphine has currently no evident production routes on the planet's surface or in its atmosphere.

Following the announcement of the detection of phosphine (PH3) in the cloud deck of Venus at millimeter wavelengths, we have searched for other possible signatures of this molecule in the infrared range.

Amino acids are considered to be prime ingredients in chemistry, leading to life.

Venus might not be a sweltering, waterless hellscape today, if Jupiter hadn't altered its orbit around the Sun, according to new UC Riverside research.

Considering the implications of the reported single spectral line detection of phosphine (PH3) by Greaves et al., we were inspired to re-examine data obtained from the Pioneer-Venus Large Probe Neutral Mass Spectrometer (LNMS) to search for evidence of phosphorus compounds.

We propose an abiotic geological mechanism that accounts for the abundance of phosphine detected by Greaves et al., 2020.