A few weeks ago, we were surprised with the news of the discovery of phosphane (or phosphine) on Venus, a molecule that, on Earth, is excreted by microorganisms in oxygen-free environments, which could be an indicator of microbial life in clouds. high in the atmosphere of Venus.
But, beyond the implications of this discovery – new checks will have to be made through the ALMA telescope to determine if indeed the detection was phosphane and what its origin is – Venus is not a planet at all friendly to life.
Our neighbor is named after the goddess of love and beauty; and in fact, it has very beautiful colors, which make it the brightest planet in the entire solar system. However, up close, Venus looks more like a ‘monster’. Its surface temperature is around 500 ºC, somewhat suffocating; the pressure is unbearable and rivers of lava and molten rock shape its landscape.
But Venus might not have turned out to be a sweltering, waterless inferno, as it is today, were it not for Jupiter, according to new research published in the Planetary Science Journal , which notes that the gas giant altered the orbit of Venus.
Jupiter is very massive. So much so that its total mass is two and a half times that of all the other planets in our solar system put together. Because it is (comparatively) gigantic, it has the ability to disturb the orbits of other planets.
How did it happen?
At the beginning of the formation of our solar system, Jupiter approached the Sun, and then moved away, due to interactions with the disk of gases from which the gaseous planets are formed. In his wake, as he drew farther and farther, he modified Venus in a definitive way.
And why do scientists say it altered its habitability? Currently, the orbit of Venus is the most circular of any planet in our solar system. However, the scientific model shows that when Jupiter was closer to the Sun about a billion years ago, Venus probably had a much more elliptical orbit, which would have endowed it, with a much higher probability, with the ability to host life .
That is to say, the new orbit of Venus – caused, according to this study, by the influence of Jupiter – placed the planet closer and for longer to the Sun, which heated it up to making it the suffocating hell that it is today, and incompatible for life. . And possibly losing the water that he supposedly would have possessed.
Could Venus have harbored life?
According to astrobiologist Stephen Kane, co-author of the study: “As Jupiter migrated, Venus would have undergone dramatic changes in the climate, warming, cooling and losing more and more its water in the atmosphere.”
As for the recent discovery of phosphine on Venus, Kane believes that it is possible that the gas is a remnant of “the last surviving species on a planet that underwent a dramatic change in its environment.”
However, for that to be the case, Kane points out that microbes would have had to maintain their presence in sulfuric acid clouds over Venus for about a billion years since Venus last had liquid water on the surface, a scenario. hard to imagine; although not impossible.
