In the pictures taken by Soviet landing probes on Venus, there are moving objects that may have "properties of living things." Leonid Ksanfomality, a researcher at the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, came to this unexpected conclusion
One of the images from the probe
The scientist writes in his article published in the Astronomical Bulletin about "appearing, changing or disappearing objects of noticeable size, from decimeter to half a meter, the accidental appearance of images of which is difficult to explain due to noise."
He recalls that in the 1970s and 1980s, Soviet scientists carried out a number of successful missions to explore Venus, which resulted in the first ever photographs of the planet's surface. The Venera-9 and Venera-10 vehicles in 1975, and then Venera-13 and Venera-14 in 1982, received a series of television panoramas of Venus using scanning photometric cameras of the optical-mechanical type.
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According to Xanfomality, the impetus for a new attempt to analyze the old results of missions to Venus was "an extensive stream of new research results of exoplanets of moderate mass, among which there should be bodies with physical conditions close to Venusian ones."
The scientist recalls that over the past 17 years, more than 500 planets have been discovered in other stars, while the search for planets where life is possible is carried out based on the postulate of normal physical conditions in the "life zone", that is, pressure, temperature, possibly the composition of the atmosphere like the earthly ones.
Ksanfomality believes that this approach can to some extent be called "terrestrial chauvinism" - that is, it completely excludes the possibility that some life forms can exist under completely different conditions inherent in many exoplanets.
The scientist writes that the possibility of the existence of life at relatively high temperatures cannot be completely ruled out, despite the fact that there are no such experimental data yet.
In his article, Ksanfomality paid special attention to nine panoramas from Venera 13, transmitted on March 1, 1982, for two hours and six minutes. On them, he found several objects that appear and disappear in a series of sequential shots.
Among them are the “disc” that changes its shape, the “black flap” that appeared in the first picture near the cone to measure the mechanical properties of the soil and disappeared later, as well as the “scorpion”, which in its structure resembles large terrestrial arachnids or insects. For example, the "scorpion" appeared about 90 minutes after the cameras were turned on, and after 26 minutes it disappeared, leaving a groove in the ground in its place.
According to the Ksanfomality hypothesis, at first the lander made a loud noise - squibs were fired, the drilling rig was working. Some of the "inhabitants" of Venus left the dangerous area, but some of them (for example, the same "scorpion") were covered by the soil thrown out during landing, and they slowly got out of it, which explains the one and a half hour delay in their appearance.
“Without discussing the existing ideas about the impossibility of life in the conditions of Venus, let us make a bold assumption that morphological signs still suggest that some of the objects found have the properties of living beings,” the scientist writes in his article.
At the same time, Ksanfomality emphasizes that his article does not include other materials received from Venera-13 and other vehicles of the Venera series. The scientist plans to publish them separately.
It is worth noting that other scientists do not exclude that Venus once had water. In particular, specialists working with the Venus Express spacecraft, launched in 2005, do not exclude that microscopic life forms could survive to this day in the high layers of the planet's clouds.
About ten years ago, a similar hypothesis was put forward by scientists at the University of Texas at El Paso. They came to the conclusion that at an altitude of 50 km, the temperature drops to +70 degrees (the average temperature on the planet is +460 degrees), the pressure approaches the pressure on the Earth's surface, which means that Venus's clouds contain a large amount of water.
In addition, the atmosphere contains hydrogen sulfide and sulfur dioxide, gases that must react with each other. Scientists say that these two gases can be present in the atmosphere at the same time only if they are constantly supplied there from some source. Also, gaseous carbonyl sulfide was discovered on the planet - one of the signs of the presence of living organisms.
American scientists suggested that these gases may be the waste products of certain microorganisms that can use the sun's ultraviolet radiation as an energy source.