Live and breathe (12/01/22)

Good afternoon, and happy Thursday. It’s good to be back.

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It's Alive...Or Not

In September 2020, a team of astronomers made waves across the scientific community when they reported they’d identified phosphine, a potential marker of life, in the atmosphere of Venus.

Now, NASA says those findings were too good to be true.

What's the big deal about Venus? Venus remains somewhat of a mystery to us. It’s surrounded by dense, reflective, sulfuric clouds, which make observations from afar difficult. And whenever anyone tried to send a lander to the planet to gather more information, the incredibly high surface temperatures and pressures destroyed it within minutes.

For decades now, space agencies the world around have forgone attempts to study Venus, instead prioritizing Mars missions. There’s only one active mission, JAXA's Akatsuki orbiter, still studying the planet from nearby. So when observations from the ALMA telescope in Chile showed evidence of phosphine in the atmosphere, it was big news.

On Earth, phosphine is only created through biological processes; for example, it’s produced by some species of anaerobic bacteria and by decaying organic matter. Phosphine can be found on Jupiter and Saturn, as well, where scientists believe it’s forged in the intense environments in the planets’ depths, then brought to the surface by currents of gas. But on Venus, there is no known geological explanation for the existence of phosphine—so naturally, the scientific community jumped at the possibility of life.

Enter NASA

Such huge potential discoveries require a lot of fact-checking. To follow up on the 2020 study, NASA sent its now-retired SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) aircraft out on a mission to observe the planet. SOFIA’s vantage point in the stratosphere meant that it could observe Venus more clearly than a ground-based telescope like ALMA.

Sadly for believers in life on Venus, the SOFIA observations refuted that there is any phosphine in the planet’s atmosphere. According to the research team, if there is any phosphine there at all, it’s no more than 0.8 parts per billion, far lower than the original estimate of 20 parts per billion.

There's still hope: The original finding had at least one valuable outcome: rekindling interest in studying Venus. NASA, ESA, Roscosmos, and ISRO have each announced science missions to Earth’s evil twin within the coming decade, and Rocket Lab made a splashy announcement earlier this year that it is planning on launching its own Venus atmospheric probe as early as next year.

Plus, the original authors of the phosphine findings stand by their study, and say there are possibilities that NASA may have overlooked. Pretty soon, we may know for sure.

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Other News from the Cosmos

• An asteroid was spotted before striking Earth for only the sixth time in history.

• Several CubeSats that flew to space with Artemis I aren’t doing too hot now (Via Payload).

• A JAXA study from 2016 that simulated the long-term effects of residing in space used falsified data, a review board found.

• Researchers spotted a jet of hot matter moving at nearly the speed of light as it was ejected by a black hole.

• An ancient megatsunami on Mars may have been caused by an asteroid impact similar to the one that killed off the dinosaurs on Earth, a study found.

• Intra-group light, the faint light that glows between galaxies, has been observed by a team of astronomers at the University of New South Wales.

• Tweaking the process of creating solar cells could greatly increase their energy production, a study from the University of Surrey found.

• BlueWalker 3, a satellite testing direct-to-cell connectivity, became one of the top 20 brightest objects in the sky (stars and planets included) after unfolding its massive solar array last month (Via Payload).

Rachael's Recs

☄️ A hole in space and time: A team of physicists at Caltech says that they’ve used a quantum computer to create the very first observable wormhole—and transmit data through it. That’s really big news for unifying quantum physics and the theory of relativity. Quantum Magazine ran a feature on the experiment and what it could mean for physics.

📸 Reality check: JWST captivated the world when it started beaming incredible photos of the cosmos back to Earth earlier this year. But, as an infrared telescope, the images it’s taking aren’t actually what you’d see if you saw the same objects with your own eyes. An article in the Dec. 2022 edition of Scientific American uses charts and data to explain how JWST turns its infrared observations into the beautiful photographs we’ve come to recognize.

The View from Space

Our view of the Pillars of Creation just keeps getting better and better. Yesterday, NASA released this image of the iconic star-forming region—a composite of observations in the near- and mid-infrared.

And here's a bonus, since I missed you last week:

JWST has also captured an image of Titan, the ocean moon of Jupiter and a promising spot to look for life off of Earth.