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Could there be life in the clouds of the planet Venus?

A team of planetary scientists think that microbes could be surviving on Venus by migrating between different atmospheric layers.

Venus.

When we talk about potentially suitable places for life, Venus does not appear on the list despite being technically in the zone of habitability of the Sun. Its hellish environment produced by greenhouse gases, its crushing atmospheric pressure and clouds of sulfuric acid, does not they are precisely friendly to life as we know it. The few probes we sent there barely lasted minutes on the fiery surface.

However, at an altitude between 40 and 60 km, the atmosphere of Venus is the most similar to that of Earth in the entire Solar System. There the air pressure is very similar to that of the earth and the temperatures move in an arc that goes from zero to 50 degrees Celsius. It is not a place where humans can survive without some kind of protection. but maybe other kinds of creatures.

The question of whether microbes could survive in certain Venusian atmospheric swathes has been debated by scientists like Carl Sagan since at least 1967.

Recent studies suggest that life could have developed on Venus for at least 3 billion years

As early as this century, a 2004 article proposed that sulfur in the atmosphere could be used by these microbes as a means of converting ultraviolet light to other wavelengths that would even allow photosynthesis. In 2018, another study even suggested that the dark spots that appear in the Venusian atmosphere could be something similar to the algal blooms that routinely occur in Earth’s lakes and oceans.

However, most of these studies concluded that microbial life in Venus’s atmosphere, if it exists, would have a very short life expectancy. In fact, the microbes would slowly fall through the clouds into the lower layers, where they would end up being incinerated by heat or crushed by atmospheric pressure, higher closer to the surface.

Now, however, a team of researchers led by astrobiologist Sara Seager suggests in a paper just appeared in Astrobiology that those microbes might, after all, have a much more stable life cycle than previously thought. One that would even allow them to survive for millions of years.

Life cycle in the heights

In their study, Seager and his colleagues explore the possibility that microbes on Venus live in a liquid environment, inside small droplets suspended in the clouds of the habitable strip. But as the number of microbes increases, gravity will cause the droplets to settle in the hottest and most uninhabitable layer just below the clouds. However, as the droplets evaporated, the lower layer of mist would gradually become a veritable reservoir of “inactive life.” Later, the updrafts would regularly carry the dormant microbes back into the clouds, where they would rehydrate and become active again.

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The hypothetical cycle for life in the atmosphere of Venus

“Assuming that life must reside inside the cloud droplets, we solve the subsequent enigma of the gravitationally deposited droplets and reach hotter and uninhabitable regions by proposing a Venusian life cycle in which a critical weight, the microbes dry up to spores when they reach the lower haze layer, which we call the reservoir,” the researchers write.

“The dried spores would reside there until some of them could be transported back to the habitable, temperate cloud layers, where they would again be enveloped in cloud droplets and continue the life cycle.”

Like on earth

On Earth, many microorganisms can be dragged into the atmosphere, where they have been found living at altitudes of more than 40 km. Furthermore, on our planet there is a growing catalog of bacteria capable of living in incredibly harsh environments, from the hot springs of Yellowstone, the hydrothermal vents of the deep ocean, or the most acidic and polluted environments around the world.

In this way, the possibility of life on Venus becomes, with this study, a hypothesis that can be tested.

According to Sukrit Ranjan, co-author of the research, “it is worth seriously thinking about investing the necessary resources to carry out this test, such as those that would be required to bring a sample of the atmosphere of Venus back to Earth.” In this way, the researchers consider, we could definitely get out of doubt.

Source: Phys.org

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