Venus are hostile to life - but the environment of its upper cloud deck, which is around 35 miles above the surface, is temperate.
Any phosphine present in the clouds would get destroyed quickly due to the acidic nature of the clouds, according to the study published in Nature Astronomy.Jane Greaves, from Cardiff University, and colleagues observed Venus with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in 2017 and 2019, respectively.They detected a spectral signature that is unique to phosphine, and estimated an abundance of 20 parts-per-billion of phosphine in Venus’s clouds.Researchers looked at different ways the gas may have been produced, including from sources on the surface of the planet,.
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