A recent research indicates that if there is really life on Venus, it might have originated from Earth onboard an asteroid that scooped up microbes up above our atmosphere.
Last week, researchers confirmed the discovery at an altitude where temperatures and pressures are close to those at sea level here on Earth of the potential biosignature gas phosphine in Venus's atmosphere.
Phosphine could be created by unusual chemical reactions that have little to do with life, the research team said. But it is also likely that bacteria hovering in Venus' sulfuric-acid clouds are churning out the gas.
Those microbes could be part of the family tree of Earth's life if they exist. After all, lots of Earth material has made its way to Venus over the eons, chunks of the planet that were blasted into space by comet or asteroid impacts and ended up being captured from the gravitational grip of the sun in the second rock.
Astrobiologists claim that certain microbe organisms are extremely hardy, so it is not crazy to believe that any of them might have survived this arduous interplanetary voyage intact. (In a similar manner, massive volumes of Mars rock have come our way, causing some researchers to speculate that Earth life may potentially trace its Red Planet lineage.)
But to take Earth microbes on their way to Venus, you may not need a disruptive effect. In the new report, Harvard University's Amir Siraj and Avi Loeb say a sky-skimming near miss could do the trick.
Siraj, a Harvard undergraduate student, and Loeb, who leads the astronomy department of the university, took influence from a meteor that lit up the sky over Western Australia and South Australia in July 2017. A new analysis by a separate research team suggested that the fireball was triggered by an approximately 12-inch-wide, 132-lb entity that zoomed through Earth's upper atmosphere for 90 seconds, then resumed its trek into deep space.
In a paper published last April, Siraj and Loeb proposed that such Earth-grazing asteroids could theoretically move life from our planet to worlds orbiting other stars.
To be specific, Siraj and Loeb do not claim that life has certainly leaped from Earth to Venus or vice versa. But they hope their paper will spur further discussion of this possibility.
Now that scientists have spotted a potential biosignature in the atmosphere of Venus, it's time to start thinking a bit more seriously about what the pathways for the sharing of life could really be since these planets are so similar and so many rocks can be exchanged, Siraj said in an interview with Space.com.
