Life on Venus? Earth's hadean twin.

                  (Image: Akatsuki.  The Venus Climate Orbiter [VCO]) 

Venus, Earth's twin, is all but a hellish planetary landscape.  A planet that is second in obit around the Sun, with an atmosphere that is made up of mostly toxic carbon dioxide and temperatures on the planet's surface that exceed more than 800 degrees. It's winds, which cycle over the planet every five days, are ferocious at 186 miles per hour, all the while the dense cloud cover rains down sulfuric acid, but it is the atmospheric pressure that is truly astounding.  At 90 times the density of Earth, it is comparable to over one mile under the Earth's ocean, this crushing environment of Venus is due to its thick and cyanogenic atmosphere.  Thought to once mirror the Earth billions of years ago, scientists believe that Venus, in its terrestrial history, also harbored water.  A planet with no moons or rings, it is, by its scientific definition a true hadean of our solar system.   

Named after the Greek goddess of love, Venus has fascinated peoples for centuries. The Venusian orbit holds a rhythmical eight year pattern, aligning itself when observed from the Earth and returning to exact same place and monthly date in the night sky, known as the pentagram of Venus.  It is also a planet steeped in myth, deemed the morning star and evening star, although technically it is a planet not a star, Venus rises in the morning before the sun and fades as the day becomes lighter, in the evening it illuminates once again from the east, becoming the evening star.  It is the brightest object that has a constant elucidation.  The Egyptians believed Venus was two different planets, the Greeks called Venus the morning star Phosphoros “light bringer”, later morphing into the Christian/Judean texts as Lucifer or Heylel (Jewish), it is seen in mythology as an entity that tried to overtake the omnipotent, instead was cast down into the underwold, as the day begins. 

The fascination of the planet Venus remains to this day, particularly in light of the recent discovery by researches studying the Venusian atmosphere, detecting a biosignature of a compound known as phosphine, a obscure chemical that is found in swaps, intestines and mico-organisms.   It is made up of a single atom of phosphorus and three atoms of hydrogen, in large quantities a poisonous substance, yet it is also produced by microbes on Earth to which in theory, maybe living in the what is thought is the more inhabitable aspects of Venus's upper atmospheres.  What is exciting about this discovery, although phosphine has been detected in Saturn's and Jupiter's rich hydrogen atmospheres as non organic chemical reactions, is that it seems the most unlikely place for any life to exist, given Venus's brutally hostile and highly acidic environment. Yet, this biosignature offers a possible glimpse that primitive life has discovered. If that is the case, then it is certain that other forms of life maybe more prevalent throughout our own Solar System.