United Kingdom, Sep 17
While Mars, our closest neighbour, gets a lot of attention (and rovers), Venus, our neighbouring planet on the other side, is also being studied by scientists.
A research team has found something interesting in the atmosphere of Venus.
The team studied Venus’s atmosphere using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii and forty-five radio telescope antennas in the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile. They were excited to discover traces of phosphine (about twenty molecules per billion), a rare toxic gas, in the atmosphere of Venus.
It was detected by a distinct pattern of light that the gas emits from within the planet’s clouds.
On Earth, Phosphine gas is made by micro-organisms that live in oxygen-free environments and in the intestines of some animals.
Researchers have suggested that there is a possibility of microbial activity in the upper layers of Venus’s atmosphere.