PARIS: Venus’ reputation as a planet which offers nil prospect of life could be untrue, according to a pair of scientists who suggest that mysterious dark patches that swirl around its atmosphere may be vast communities of hardy bacteria.

Earth’s closest neighbour was transformed in the early Sixties from the status of sister planet to other-world hell.

That was when Soviet and US probes revealed its surface to be scorchingly hot, with an atmosphere pumped up like a pressure cooker and laced with metal-eating acids.

But, according to University of Texas researchers Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Louis Irwin, the planet may have a surprising niche of life in its upper atmosphere, New Scientist reports.

“From an astrobiology point of view, Venus is not hopeless,” Schulze-Makuch told the British weekly.

The evidence for this, the duo last week told a European workshop on astrobiology in Graz, Austria, comes from an archive of data from the Russian Venera space missions and the US Pioneer Venus and Magellan probes.

The chemical composition of the Venus atmosphere suggest that something odd is happening there — and the answer could be bacterial life, they suggest.

The researchers found hydrogen sulphide and sulphur dioxide, gases that normally react with each other and thus are never found together unless something is producing them.

They also found carbonyl sulphide, a gas that normally only ever comes from a biological source.

Their theory is that bacteria could be living in clouds 50 kms up in the Venusian atmosphere, where conditions are relatively balmy. The temperature is about 70 C (158 F), the pressure is the equivalent of one Earth atmosphere and there are water droplets.

The bugs could be soaking up ultraviolet light from the Sun as an energy source, which, if true, would explain why there are strange dark patches on UV images of the planet, the researchers believe.

The dismaying evidence of Venus’ adverse conditions for human life caused the focus of planetary missions to shift to Mars, which is farther away and colder and darker.—AFP