Image credit to Kevin Gill on Wikimedia Commons

The planet Venus is the easiest of the planets to spot with the naked eye from here on earth. Due to her high albedo and proximity to the sun she will appear at dusk, heralding the appearance of the stars before disappearing through the night, only to return at dawn as the stars fade into the morning light.

She may also harbor life.

Conditions on her surface are rightly described as “hellish”. The high temperatures, pressures, intense volcanism and presence of chemicals such as sulfuric acid are notorious for “killing” probes in a matter of minutes. Earthlings would probably not fare much better.

Phosphine is a gas produced by either volcanic or biological processes. In 2020, phosphine was detected in the upper atmosphere of Venus in concentrations higher than what could be accounted for by volcanic processes alone. Now, there have been published studies attempting to disprove these observations but, despite what the shitheads at Wikipedia say, the presence of phosphine has been validated by repeat observations.

This discovery has lead to some renewed interest in…

Fuck it, its not that serious, I can write this like I’m posting on hexbear, because I’m posting on hexbear.

Look at this picture okay?

An image of venus in the visible spectrum

Thats her, thats Venus, thats what she actually looks like to the naked eye. If you stood before her, in all her terror and glory, this is what you would see (more or less). Virtually every other picture you have ever seen of Venus has been some kind of false color image, usually in the ultraviolet spectrum, maybe in the infrared or really high or low ends of the visible spectrum with the contrast jacked way, way up.

a picture of venus in the ultraviolet spectrum

This is an image of Venus, taken by Mariner 10, in the ultraviolet range.

The dark lines are areas where UV light is being absorbed. We don’t know whats doing that. We call it the “unknown ultraviolet absorber” and we don’t really know what it is. We have been staring at this thing for nearly a century and we don’t know what it is. Its prevalent enough to impact Venus’s weather cycle, its intensity waxes and wanes over time, it moves around, and best guesses have it absorbing about 50% of all UV light hitting Venus.

And we have no idea what it is.

The discovery of phosphine has lead to a reexamination of old data and… okay here’s the arxiv link and here’s the direct link to the pdf. If you have gotten this far and can parse astrobiological scientific journal articles you should read this because the argument it makes is rock-solid and very, very thoroughly detailed. If that’s not your jam here’s a youtube link to a lecture by Astrobiology rockstar Sara Seager about astrobiological study on Venus, it covers most of the same content.

Basically, there is a whole lot of really specific, really weird things going on in the atmosphere of Venus. No feasible combination of abiotic factors are able to form a model that explains all of them. Carl Sagan once proposed that the Unknown UV Absorber was microbial in nature and that seems to get more and more likely every day.

We won’t know for sure until we get some in-situ studies going on. Thankfully there are a handful on the way, including one planning on launching either this or next year. Its not sexy, basically a probe will fall through the atmosphere and use a laser to check for organic molecules, but its going to be the first of many. And its lead by Sara Seager, the aformentioned astrobio rockstar.

I just think about this a lot. We may have been looking at life, elsewhere in the universe, since before we were even human.

and it will have been on Venus, marscucks btfo lmao

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