Goddess’s fire and desire leads to yeah baby Venus moment

This year, SciFest Africa is happening virtually for the first time in its 24-year history, as the Covid-19 pandemic continues to take its toll on the world.

On the plus side, Zoom culture has meant international speakers become more accessible to a South African audience and this week, a world-class astronomer on the team exploring the possibility of life on Venus spoke to those of us on the tip of Africa.

Sara Seager is a professor of astronomy at the world’s top-ranked university, the US’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is on an international team that recently made the stunning announcement that phosphine has been discovered in Venus’s atmosphere.

This chemical is “usually associated with certain kinds of microbial life on Earth or is produced in labs”, according to Canada’s University of Toronto, where Seager first laid the foundation of her stellar career, “and scientists were astounded to find it on the second planet from the sun”.

Seager and her colleagues at MIT were searching for gases on planets outside our solar system when they heard that scientists in the UK had detected possible phosphine on Venus. They immediately dropped what they were doing to immerse themselves in this research.

Using powerful telescopes, the scientists collaborated and eventually confirmed their findings, that while “eliminating the possibility that another gas was mimicking the presence of phosphine in the quantities being observed”.

And boom, the possibility of life on Venus, commonly viewed as a crazy idea for decades, was suddenly on the table.

She said she cannot say what the odds are that there is life on Venus and that far more research is needed, but the stunning confirmation of phosphine is a major breakthrough since “Venus has a surface temperature of 370ºC, has 90 times the atmospheric pressure of Earth and the clouds are made of sulphuric acid”.

Over the past few days, however, other scientists have refuted the claims made by Seager and her team members.

A study, still to be peer-reviewed, by Ignas Stellen and a team from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, said there is a flaw in how the team handled the data and that this led to “erroneously high high-confidence” signals. Where they did deal with the data correctly, it does not adequately prove detection of phosphine, they said. 

But Seager takes it in her stride and told those at SciFest: “That is how science works. We come with a theory and test it, and then others do their own research, and so we keep exploring.”

Beyond her identity as one of the world’s top astronomers, Seager is also a devoted mother and passionate about helping others understand astronomy in more accessible terms.

She said: “I grew up in Toronto and we could basically see no stars at all from the city. But then when I was 10, I went on my first camping trip and saw the dark night sky with stars and it blew me away.”

Fast-forward to a woman on the brink of turning 50 who knows more about the galaxy than most other human beings.

In her case, the sky is far from the limit.