Life on Venus? The Picture Gets Cloudier

 
A false-color view of Venus taken by Japan’s Akatsuki Venus Climate Orbiter in 2018.

“A team of astronomers made a blockbuster claim in the fall. They said they had discovered compelling evidence pointing to life floating in the clouds of Venus. If true, that would be stunning. People have long gazed into the cosmos and wondered whether something is alive out there. For an affirmative answer to pop up on the planet in the orbit next to Earth’s would suggest that life is not rare in the universe, but commonplace. The astronomers, led by Jane Greaves of Cardiff University in Wales, could not see any microscopic Venusians with their telescopes on Earth. Rather, in a paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy, they reported the detection of a molecule called phosphine and said they could come up with no plausible explanation for how it could form there except as the waste product of microbes. ...”

 
A colorized mosaic of the surface of Venus, seen through its clouds by the Magellan spacecraft in the early 1990s.

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