#3 doesn’t mean much either way. The main Nature journal may be the most prestigious and impactful in science, but the common joke is that only half of the results in it are real.

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

>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-...

At the same time, that comment is based on someone, working in exoplanetary 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

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

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".

> Still, John Carpenter, an ALMA observatory scientist, is skeptical that the phosphine observations themselves are real.

The reality is that John Carpenter was taken over by an alien in 1982. This, finally, is confirmation that the alien came from Venus.

Source: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084787/

Having doubt is the default position in science. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

It’s an interesting finding, but it’s prudent to remain skeptical.

I agree in principle, but the statement "there is doubt about the quality of the radio detection" implies that there have been concrete issues pointed out about the basis of these findings, which I haven't heard anywhere else.

In fairness, it is too early to have a thorough review. The press conference and paper are less than an hour old. Be wary of anyone making bold claims right now, author or armchair scientist.

Feels like the relevant question is "Is the evidence, circumstantial though it may be, compelling enough to justify looking more closely?"

>Feels like the relevant question is "Is the evidence, circumstantial though it may be, compelling enough to justify looking more closely?"

What will the likely answer be if there is there is a chance of increased funding on the horizon?