
Life on Venus? Astronomers See a Signal in Its Clouds - uptown
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/science/venus-life-clouds.html
======
merricksb
Earlier discussion, still on the front page:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24467635](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24467635)

------
superkuh
At the time I am posting this comment the press briefing is live on youtube.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1u-jlf_Olo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1u-jlf_Olo)

------
admiralspoo
Don't hold your breath.

1) there is doubt about the quality of the radio detection 2) the same group
of authors have been promoting this for years 3) Nature Astronomy, not Nature
proper

~~~
aquova
Source on these doubts? This discovery is backed by the Royal Astronomical
Society and MIT, which seems to imply the observations have been sound.

~~~
nabla9
>Still, John Carpenter, an ALMA observatory scientist, is skeptical that the
phosphine observations themselves are real. The signal is faint, and the team
needed to perform an extensive amount of processing to pull it from the data
returned by the telescopes. That processing, he says, may have returned an
artificial signal at the same frequency as phosphine. He also notes that the
standard for remote molecular identification involves detecting multiple
fingerprints for the same molecule, which show up at different frequencies on
the electromagnetic spectrum. That’s something that the team has not yet done
with phosphine.

>“They took the right steps to verify the signal, but I’m still not convinced
that this is real,” Carpenter says. “If it’s real, it’s a very cool result,
but it needs follow-up to make it really convincing.”

>Sousa-Silva agrees that the team needs to confirm the phosphine detection by
finding additional fingerprints at other wavelengths. She and her colleagues
had planned such observations using the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared
Astronomy, a plane-mounted telescope, and with NASA’s Infrared Telescope
Facility in Hawaii. But COVID-19 got in the way, and the team’s attempts have
been put on hold.

[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/09/possible-...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/09/possible-
sign-of-life-found-on-venus-phosphine-gas/)

~~~
SiempreViernes
At the same time, that comment is based on someone, working in _exo_ planetary
science, skimming the paper for at most two hours before commenting.

Just looking at figure 2[0], it doesn't look like the ALMA a detection is
particularly weak and looks like a proper line. Of course, I don't know the
full analysis chain, so I can't say how hard it is to make a line like this
completely by accident, but I doubt you could tell just from this figure
either way.

[0]:
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1174-4/figures/2](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1174-4/figures/2)

~~~
nabla9
One of the authors agrees that the finding needs additional confirmation in
the last paragraph.

~~~
SiempreViernes
Well yeah, xkcd 2268 is a good joke for a reason. Confirmation of a new result
is always desirable and everybody knows this, "more studies needed" is however
not the same as saying "we're probably wrong".

------
zurfer
better title: phosphine found in venus atmosphere, some scientists suspect
microbes

------
buryat
even Venus life moved into the clouds

~~~
shadowgovt
I think that's unclear at this time; IIUC, the phosphine could be generated at
ground level, since Venus's atmosphere is so thick that it'd have to be lifted
up a bit before UV light can start breaking it down.

~~~
naravara
The paper posits the microbes living in droplets in the clouds hypothesis.
Heat and pressure at ground level are not as conducive to life.

------
macintux
Extensive discussion yesterday;
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24463423](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24463423)

~~~
codethief
And earlier today:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24467635](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24467635)

------
sto_hristo
I called 2020 August to be the aliens month and 2020 September the random
explosions month. But i'm contempt with this resolution as well.

------
perihelions
Here's the research paper (full paper, open access)

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1174-4](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1174-4)

------
biggestlou
I’m still looking for intelligent life on THIS planet!

~~~
c22
Needs a little more work still. Maybe try using italics instead of caps?

------
ve55
Given how low my prior would be that life currently exists on Venus compared
to all the other possible explanations for this, I wouldn't count on it at
this point

Surprised this comment has a negative score, I'd be willing to bet at 50/50
that life on Venus won't be found within the next 5 years, there are _a lot_
of alternative explanations with reasonable priors

~~~
sonofgod
The probability of developing a probe, it travelling to Venus and analysing
the data from it within that timescale is worse than 50/50.

