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Space

Have we spotted alien life floating in the clouds of Venus?

By Leah Crane

14 September 2020

Venus

An unusual gas has been spotted in the clouds of Venus

dotted zebra / Alamy

The clouds of Venus may contain life. Some 50 to 60 kilometres above the surface, there are small quantities of phosphine gas, a substance that is present in Earth’s atmosphere because it is produced by microbes and by human technological processes. There are no known non-biological mechanisms of making the gas on Venus, so it may be being produced by alien microbes.

Jane Greaves at Cardiff University, UK, led a team of astronomers who looked at Venus using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii and the…

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