Transcripts before you watch

TRANSCRIPTS

Before you watch

Newsreader: An international team of scientists say they’ve found potential signs of life on the planet Venus. There’s only one planet closer to the sun than Venus and its surface temperatures reach around 480 degrees centigrade. But scientists have said that they’ve detected small amounts of a gas in Venus’ atmosphere which could come from tiny microbes.

Newsreader: Professor Jane Greaves is from Cardiff University in South Wales.

Professor Jane Greaves: I was just stunned. I mean I did this as an interesting experiment. I’d never really thought about detecting it.

Newsreader: So, what exactly did they find? Researchers have discovered that the planet’s clouds contain a gas called phosphine. On Earth, phosphine can be produced by tiny organisms that live in environments without oxygen. This means microbes may also be present on our closest neighbor and provides an exciting sign of possible life beyond Earth.

Professor Jane Greaves: The key to what we’ve found is the presence of phosphine gas in the clouds of Venus. This is very unexpected because phosphine is a phosphorous atom and three hydrogen atoms and there’s really very little hydrogen available in the atmosphere so we think something is...a process that’s making it and one of the possibilities is it’s small, floating organisms.

Newsreader: The team behind the study first detected the phosphine using a telescope in Hawaii and confirmed it using a radio telescope in Chile. They also studied non-biological explanations for the gas such as volcanoes and meteorites, but decided these were not responsible. The research continues to either confirm the presence of life or find an alternative explanation.