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Venus science announcement - 14 Sep 2020
by
FutureSpaceTourist
on 14 Sep, 2020 13:05
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Live stream of RAS press conference at 15:00 UTC today:
Please wait until the announcement before posting updates & discussing in this thread.
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#1
by
FutureSpaceTourist
on 14 Sep, 2020 13:10
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#2
by
yg1968
on 14 Sep, 2020 13:23
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Related tweet:
You may have heard a rumour that we're announcing something big this afternoon - well of course we want you to be the first to know what's going on so stayed tuned here. At 4 pm [BST] [11 am EST] this video will go live and we'll also be live-streaming our press conference.
https://twitter.com/RoyalAstroSoc/status/1305454796225351682
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#3
by
Star One
on 14 Sep, 2020 13:39
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#4
by
Star One
on 14 Sep, 2020 13:54
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#5
by
Orbiter
on 14 Sep, 2020 14:04
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Not to ruin the story, but if the rumors on Twitter are correct then this is a huge deal.
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#6
by
libra
on 14 Sep, 2020 14:35
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#7
by
Orbiter
on 14 Sep, 2020 15:02
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Announcement starting.
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#8
by
Orbiter
on 14 Sep, 2020 15:10
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The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile independently detected the presence of phosphine in Venus's atmosphere (about 20 ppb) and is a possible indicator of extraterrestrial life.
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#9
by
Star One
on 14 Sep, 2020 15:13
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#10
by
Orbiter
on 14 Sep, 2020 15:15
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Phosphine isn't something made abiologically on Earth, only in a lab or by life. Probably wasn't made by photochemistry. Volcanoes could produce tiny traces of phosphine, but at a smaller quantity than observded. Lightning and meteorites would also fall short by a factor of millions as an explanation. Two possibilities: some completely unknown, exotic chemistry in the clouds of Venus, or life.
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#11
by
Star One
on 14 Sep, 2020 15:18
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Related ESOCast on this announcement:
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#12
by
Alpha_Centauri
on 14 Sep, 2020 15:21
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Annoyingly I missed the part where they said it couldn't be made photochemically, anyone know what he said?
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#13
by
vjkane
on 14 Sep, 2020 15:22
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First questions (I haven't read the press release): 1) how much above the signal to noise level is the detection and 2) have the measurements persisted over time?
I remember the telescopic detection of methane on Mars. Subsequent missions have found a story, not a clear one, but not one that I believe strongly backs the original telescopic observations.
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#14
by
ncb1397
on 14 Sep, 2020 15:27
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Phosphine isn't something made abiologically on Earth, only in a lab or by life. Probably wasn't made by photochemistry. Volcanoes could produce tiny traces of phosphine, but at a smaller quantity than observded. Lightning and meteorites would also fall short by a factor of millions as an explanation. Two possibilities: some completely unknown, exotic chemistry in the clouds of Venus, or life.
Is there a clear distinction between life and "exotic chemistry"? Life would just be a subset of exotic chemistry.
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#15
by
Orbiter
on 14 Sep, 2020 15:29
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Phosphine isn't something made abiologically on Earth, only in a lab or by life. Probably wasn't made by photochemistry. Volcanoes could produce tiny traces of phosphine, but at a smaller quantity than observded. Lightning and meteorites would also fall short by a factor of millions as an explanation. Two possibilities: some completely unknown, exotic chemistry in the clouds of Venus, or life.
Is there a clear distinction between life and "exotic chemistry"?
We don't know enough about how life forms to make that distinction.
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#16
by
baldusi
on 14 Sep, 2020 15:34
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#17
by
leovinus
on 14 Sep, 2020 15:38
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Annoyingly I missed the part where they said it couldn't be made photochemically, anyone know what he said?
That seems to be the last page of the paper, Fig 10 extended, "too low production rates by 4 to 5 magnitudes"
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#18
by
Star One
on 14 Sep, 2020 15:40
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A strong note of caution over this result.
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.”
https://api.nationalgeographic.com/distribution/public/amp/science/2020/09/possible-sign-of-life-found-on-venus-phosphine-gas
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#19
by
Star One
on 14 Sep, 2020 15:50
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Cool Worlds:
