That paper is more than a year old… published in September 2020. Since then, several studies have challenged - although not entirely debunked - the report.
Subsequently, on 28 January 2021, this was published in the journal ‘Nature’:
Now, a team of scientists has published the biggest critique yet. “What we bring to the table is a comprehensive look, another way of explaining this data that isn’t phosphine,” says Victoria Meadows, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle who helped to lead the latest studies. Both papers have been accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters and were posted on the arXiv preprint server on 26 January.
Alternative explanations
In one study, Meadows and her colleagues analysed data from one of the telescopes used to make the phosphine claim - and could not detect the gas’s spectral signature. In the other, the scientists calculated how gases would behave in Venus’s atmosphere - and concluded that what the original team thought was phosphine is actually sulfur dioxide (SO2), a gas that is common on Venus and is not a sign of possible life.
The latest papers pretty clearly show that there is no sign of the gas, says Ignas Snellen, an astronomer at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands who has published a different critique of the phosphine claim. “This makes the whole debate about phosphine, and possibly life in the atmosphere of Venus, quite irrelevant.”
