Out of the blue

An image of Venus, made with data recorded by Japan’s Akatsuki spacecraft in 2016. So close, so similar and very mysterious, the planet is surprising scientists with a chemical signature spotted in its clouds.Credit...PLANET-C Project Team/JAXA

Out of the blue says it all regarding Venus, our hellish twin, equipped with 800+ degree temperatures and a toxic atmosphere comprising of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid 90 times denser than earth's, may harbor life as we know it, residing in her upper atmosphere if recent research finding's ring true.

High in the toxic atmosphere of the planet Venus, astronomers on Earth have discovered signs of what might be life.

If the discovery is confirmed by additional telescope observations and future space missions, it could turn the gaze of scientists toward one of the brightest objects in the night sky. Venus, named after the Roman goddess of beauty, roasts at temperatures of hundreds of degrees and is cloaked by clouds that contain droplets of corrosive sulfuric acid. Few have focused on the rocky planet as a habitat for something living.

The astronomers, who reported the finding on Monday in a pair of papers, have not collected specimens of Venusian microbes, nor have they snapped any pictures of them. But with powerful telescopes, they have detected a chemical — phosphine — in the thick Venus atmosphere. After much analysis, the scientists assert that something now alive is the only explanation for the chemical’s source.

Something's afoot - Sherlock Holmes

Addendum - choice info about Phosphine :)

At first glance, phosphine might seem like a funny molecule to associate with life, given that it's a "highly flammable, extremely toxic, outrageously foul-smelling molecule," says Sousa-Silva. "It's an extremely dangerous molecule that kills in a variety of imaginative ways, all of which are very final and macabre."

"It's used widely as a fumigant and it was used as a chemical warfare agent in the first world war," she says, noting that the colorless gas can burn with a green and blue light.

As for its odor, well, "apparently it smells basically like death," says Sousa-Silva. "It just smells horrific. We once, I think, found a report of someone saying it smelled like the rancid diapers of the spawn of Satan."

Because phosphine interferes with oxygen metabolism, it's toxic for the majority of life on Earth. Still, says Sousa-Silva, "there's plenty of life, mostly in the shadows, that doesn't particularly enjoy oxygen and doesn't rely on oxygen. And these anaerobic ecosystems on Earth happily produce phosphine in reasonably large quantities."

Life that makes phosphine on Earth is found in swamps and sewage plants and the bottoms of lakes, she says, as well as in the intestines of animals — that's why phosphine can be detected in their flatulence.

Excellent. :)

Addendum ...

Artist’s impression of the large probe that entered Venus’s atmosphere in 1978 after deployment by NASA’s Pioneer Venus Multiprobe mission. Credit: NASA

42 years ago, NASA's Pioneer Venus probe might have discovered phosphine and perhaps Russia's Venera probes did as well.

Many experts believe the best chance of verifying Venusian phosphine lies in atmospheric probes that can directly sniff out the gas. But such missions are not futuristic flights of fancy—they have, in fact, been launched before, with notable examples including the former Soviet Union’s long series of Venera spacecraft and NASA’s Pioneer Venus Multiprobe, a mission that dropped four probes into the planet’s atmosphere in December 1978.

On the biggest of Pioneer’s probes, an instrument called the Large Probe Neutral Mass Spectrometer (LNMS) looked for gases in the atmosphere, with mission scientists focusing on molecules such as carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and argon that were known to be abundant there. After taking another look at the data, however, Rakesh Mogul, a professor of biological chemistry at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, posits that scientists on the mission underestimated their instrument, which may have spotted trace amounts of other molecules—including, excitingly, phosphine. “We were able to extract some data from the literature from about 40 years ago,” says Mogul, whose team recently posted its findings on the preprint server arXiv.org. “And we think we’re able to identify some interesting things. We believe that the evidence suggests the presence of phosphine.”

Out of the blue times 2. :)