But a team aimed both the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii and the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array in Chile at Venus and picked up phosphine's signature in a Venusian cloud layer with downright Earth-like temperatures and pressures. With its hellish surface temperature, outlandish pressure and sulfuric-acid clouds, Venus has long played second fiddle to the seemingly more potentially habitable Mars. The announcement pointed to the presence of phosphine, a rare and often poisonous gas that, on Earth at least, is almost always associated with living organisms. Read more: Alien hunters detect mystery signal from the closest star systemĪstrobiologists were a-twitter with anticipation and skepticism in September when news broke of potential evidence of life in the upper clouds of Venus. The unexplained signal reportedly shifted slightly while it was being observed, in a way that resembled the shift caused by the movement of a planet. Researchers are excited but cautious, explaining that they will need to figure out if more mundane sources, such as a comet, hydrogen cloud or even human technology, could be mimicking an alien signal, and that it will likely take time before they know one way or another if E.T. Proxima Centauri, which is just 4.2 light-years away, hosts one gas giant and one rocky world 17% larger than Earth that happens to be in its star's habitable zone, meaning liquid water could exist there. Earlier this month, researchers announced that they had captured a very mysterious beam of energy in the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum at 980 megahertz, coming from the closest star to our own. The answer to weird signals happening in the universe is never aliens, until maybe it is.
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