Signs of Life discovered on Venus and atmosphere

Re:Signs of Life discovered on Venus and atmosphere by perihelions on Sunday September 13, 2020 @04:22PM (#24463673)

"leaving the tantalizing possibility that we’ve detected the last vestiges of an ancient ecosystem."

According to the paper in your first link [0], PH3 gets destroyed by ultraviolet light-related chemistry, and so has a short lifetime in planetary atmospheres (section 2.3 on page 7, though that's specific to Earth's atmosphere). I assume this means if they've detected phosphine, there must be an ongoing process generating or replenishing it.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.05224

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Re:Signs of Life discovered on Venus and atmosphere by tectonic on Sunday September 13, 2020 @04:30PM (#24463734)

Yes, these present microbes would be ones that managed to evolve to live in the atmosphere after the surface was no longer habitable.

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Re:Signs of Life discovered on Venus and atmosphere by perihelions on Sunday September 13, 2020 @04:33PM (#24463755)

That makes sense! I misunderstood your comment.

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Re:Signs of Life discovered on Venus and atmosphere by mNovak on Sunday September 13, 2020 @10:02PM (#24466011)

Perhaps possible Venus' very thick atmosphere shielded it from UV? Or a large pocket of it was recently released due to gelogic activity. Just spitballing, I don't know enough about phosphine chem to know if that's feasible.

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Re:Signs of Life discovered on Venus and atmosphere by ianai on Sunday September 13, 2020 @11:13PM (#24466388)

If we’re seeing it’s presence through the atmosphere then it’s being irradiated by sunlight.

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