A lot of people have sent me this video over the past few days so I'm just going to jump in with my reaction, as an astrophysicist, for those who want it. Firstly, their detection of phosphine is definitely sound. The spectrum Thunderfoot showed in the video at
6:35 was the unreduced spectrum which contains what we call the "continuum" (or background) light from Venus - which is not flat, it does vary and some features get lost in that. You have to take that away to get at the signal so you can see the drop caused by the absorption due to phosphine - just because the noise is there doesn't mean the signal isn't. It's a very standard process and their observation is statistically robust - hence why you haven't heard any researchers contesting their observation of phosphine. Yes, it is a low concentration at 20 parts per billion, but consider the size of the Venusian atmosphere compared to the size of a human body (with 3 ppb Gold) and that amount of phosphine does add up. As for lightning - the authors of the original paper did consider lightning as an option when trying to explain their discovery of phosphine (free to read for all who want to:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1174-4). The problem is that a lightning strike only creates a tiny amount of phosphine. So the number of lightning strikes needed to create the amount of phosphine they observed would have been completely unrealistic. Their best estimate is that lightning could have created a few parts per *million billion*. The researchers were very thorough - they spent three years doing the analysis ensuring that they had covered all the bases before announcing what they knew would be a surprising result of phosphine on Venus. Note that they never claimed they had detected life - here's a quote from the paper itself: "Even if confirmed, we emphasize that the detection of PH3 is not robust evidence for life, only for anomalous and unexplained chemistry." So "life on Venus" never needed "busting". I spoke to three astrobiologists on my channel this week and the majority believe that this discovery of phosphine will eventually be explained by currently unknown chemistry, and not life (although one remained slightly hopeful from his experience with how adaptable life is to its environment). It sounds as if Thunderfoot's quibble is with the media (and not with the scientists themselves), trying to sell a story by sensationalizing it. Getting the information directly from the paper, or by talking to scientists themselves, helps to put these kinds of results into context. P.S. This result wasn't a NASA result. The work was led by Prof. Jane Greaves from Cardiff University in Wales, UK using the JCMT, a telescope run by the East Asian Observatory, and ALMA, a telescope run by the European Southern Observatory. P.P.S. I know Thunderfoot is a chemist, so I imagine the authors of the paper might welcome his chemistry expertise to provide any ideas he might have to explain the production of phosphine on Venus through other means beyond those they've already considered
