The significant announcement was made by the Royal Astronomical Society in a press conference on Monday.
The biosignature was detected by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) array located in Chile and the James Clerk Maxwell telescope located in Hawaii. The research was conducted by multidisciplinary teams based at the University of Manchester, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Cardiff University.
“The atmosphere [on Venus] is the only place in which life actually could, in principle, exist,” said Janusz Petkowski, research scientist at MIT Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, adding that there are no known chemical or physical processes that could produce the quantities of the gas detected.
MIT researchers previously found that anaerobic organisms, such as bacteria and microbes, can produce phosphine, adding further weight to the idea that there may be some form of life in the atmosphere of Earth’s neighboring planet.