Well, a rumour going around that there is life on Venus.
There will be an online press conference at 15:00 GMT (16:00 BST), but it amounts to measurements of levels of phosphine (PH3) being far too high in the region of potentially habitable space in Venus’ atmosphere. Levels far too high, to have been produced via chemical processes. Or so the scientists say – remember the cold fusion thing in the eighties?
Although this video has already appeared, and the videos below are what should go live at 16:00 BST.
This is the Press Conference Link:
This is the news explainer:
After peer review:
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. We demonstrate this by independently calibrating and analyzing the ALMA data using different interferometric analysis tools, in which we observe no PH3 in all cases. Furthermore, for any PH3 signature to be produced in either ALMA or JCMT spectra, PH3 needs to present at altitudes above 70 km, in stark disagreement with their photochemical network. We ultimately conclude that this detection of PH3 in the atmosphere of Venus is not supported by our analysis of the data.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.14305