Venus life signs misdetection

The detection of Phosphine in Venus' Clouds made quite big news last September, interpreted as a possible sign of life.

Critics pointed out that the PH3 spectral line used is quite close to a much less exciting SO2 line. And there is plenty of SO2 in Venus's atmosphere.

The team reanalyzed the data an published a response in November adjusting their PH3 claims down by a factor of seven, mentioning that data was obtained at the limit of observatory capabilities.
The argument against SO2 has been the absence of its reference spectral line in the data.
arxiv.org...

Now there is a new paper from another team, using a radiative transfer model of the atmosphere, claiming that the signal can not come from the cloud layer but has to originate from the mesosphere (70 km). There is no way PH3 could get up there unless one assumed absolutely unrealistic production rates.
They've also modeled the antenna configuration used in the observation and show that SO2 reference line would be too diluted to be detectable.
arxiv.org...

So is the claim dead in the water? Better data is what is desperately needed here I think.

Well.. they have the data.. now they should work with the data, there could be many unknown and known reason they got the data they got, I feel they need to dig deeper.

It wasn't a misdetection, it was a misinterpretation of the evidence, people did not properly evaluate the evidence they collected. People do that all the time, science is actually pretty boring, but people glorify and distort evidence all the time to impress people to further research funding. That follows through with misinterpretation of this virus evidence and also in misinterpretation of climate change data. It is way more profitable to go along with deceit than to try to fight it in science.

a reply to: moebius

It is possible that there is still deep crustal deposits of water, perhaps even similar to mineral deposits here on earth as well as some possible liquid water deep beneath the crust kept in a liquid state because of the high pressure and being of course trapped but even then life is not impossible despite the pressure and extreme heat but it would have to be extremophile life, life as we know it could simply not survive there.

In the past Venus may have been very different for a short or even a very long time, there are two highland regions that would be similar to continent's, the crust of Venus may also be made up of tectonic plates just like earths crust is and there is a huge lowland that if Venus ocean's had not boiled away and the water since lost most of it's hydrogen to space would have formed a planet wide ocean with those two highlands as continental land mass.

But it is only conjecture, all we know is that life is unlikely there today and even if life was possible it would have been different to the earth due to Venus weird nature, six month day's and night's and a sun that would rise in the west and set in the east would potentially mean that if life had existed it would probably have avoided the hot sun facing side and lived in the cooler twilight zones while hot wind's driven by the heat would have made a very strange weather patter and the dark side probably constantly rained, that said it is possible that as some claimed Venus strange rotational property's are rather more recent perhaps due to a huge impact and that it may too once have rotated in a more traditional fashion for our solar system.

Though of course some believe in Velikovsky's theory's that Venus was a comet like body from outside of our solar system?.
www.godkingscenario.com...

It is possible that our star has captured rogue planets in the past or even taken them from other stars that passed close to our own solar system but if such existed or exist there orbits would be extremely eccentric and Venus orbit is pretty much within the parameters of an accretion disc formed planet native to our solar system EXCEPT for it's strange rotation which is opposite to that of other inner solar system planets.
astronomy.com...
Perhaps if Velikovsky had this information his theory would have been very different, he was no cook as some make him out to be but a highly qualified and intelligent man of science even if his theory has never really been a serious contender among the cosmologists and planetary science community.

You could make some great science fiction based on a future mission to an outer solar system planet on an eccentric orbit outside of the plane of our solar system (Venus is ON the plane of our solar system to more argument for it being OF our solar system in it's origin's), the crew find a planet like earth with a dead (on it's surface at least) flash frozen alien civilization that had once orbited another star that got too close to our sun.