On The Biomass Required To Produce Phosphine Detected In The Cloud Decks Of Venus

2020/09/16 by Manasvi Lingam, Abraham Loeb, Lingam, Manasvi +1 · 1 voice · 3 citations
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #Light effects on plants #astro-ph.EP #astro-ph.IM

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2009.07835

arxiv published 2020/09/16 · arxiv updated 2020/09/29

Abstract

The detection of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus at an abundance of ∼ 20 ppb suggests that this gas is being generated by either indeterminate abiotic pathways or biological processes. We consider the latter possibility, and explore whether the amount of biomass required to produce the observed flux of phosphine may be reasonable. We estimate that the typical biomass densities predicted by our simple model are potentially orders of magnitude lower than the biomass density of Earth's aerial biosphere in the lower atmosphere. We briefly discuss how small spacecraft could sample the Venusian cloud decks and search for biomarkers.

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Discussions

• On the Biomass Required to Produce Phosphine Detected in the Clouds of Venus [hn, 2 points, 0 comments]

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