Scientists Repeatedly Recover Venus Phosphine Signal in 200-Hour Campaign as Life Claim Still Lacks Consensus
Updated
Updated · spacedaily.com · Aug 20
Scientists Repeatedly Recover Venus Phosphine Signal in 200-Hour Campaign as Life Claim Still Lacks Consensus
1 articles · Updated · spacedaily.com · Aug 20
Summary
A 200-hour JCMT-Venus program has repeatedly recovered candidate phosphine signals, adding far more follow-up data to the disputed 2020 Venus-clouds detection rather than leaving it as a one-off spectrum.
The new case rests on reprocessed ALMA observations, a disputed SOFIA reanalysis and JCMT monitoring whose first campaign produced 140 times the original dataset, though much of the processing remains unfinished.
Baseline ripples still exceed the expected absorption lines, and overlapping researchers mean the latest recoveries are not fully independent confirmation; the key unresolved questions remain whether the feature is real, whether it is phosphine and what source made it.
Reported abundances also vary sharply—from about 3 parts per billion above the clouds to roughly 0.3 parts per million near 55 kilometers—while different instruments may be sampling different altitudes, times and parts of Venus.
A 2024 review found no demonstrated abiotic process that sustains the claimed amounts, but that gap does not prove biology; the cleaner test would be independent detections of multiple phosphine lines or direct sampling by a Venus descent probe.