A few months ago scientists found evidence of phosphine gas in the Venusian atmosphere. Phosphine is a gas produced by microbial life, and finding it on Venus was a big enough deal that nonscience-specific news organizations picked up on it, like the New York Times.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the initial discovery of phosphine has turned out to be more complicated and not nearly as good for the prospect of Venusian life. Let's start with the big bummer: It wasn't actually phosphine that was detected. Spectral analysis is tough, and sometimes one chemical can be mistaken for another. That's what happened here. The phosphine was actually sulfur dioxide, which is both incredibly common on Venus and not associated with life in any way. In addition, that signal was coming from much higher up in the atmosphere, at an altitude where the sun's radiation would almost immediately destroy phosphine. So yeah, while there may very well be life in the Venusian atmosphere, we're still a long way off from finding it.
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