Study nixes life in clouds of Venus, but maybe in Jupiter's?

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A new study is throwing cold water on the possibility of life in the clouds of Venus.

Scientists from Europe and the U.S. reported Monday there isn’t nearly enough water vapor in the scorching planet’s clouds to support life as we know it.

The team looked into the matter following September’s surprise announcement by others that strange, tiny organisms could be lurking in the thick, sulfuric acid-filled clouds of Venus. Through spacecraft observations, the latest research group found the water level is more than 100 times too low to support Earth-like life.

“It's almost at the bottom of the scale and an unbridgeable distance from what life requires to be active,” said the lead author, John Hallsworth, a microbiologist at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland.

His team looked at the most dry-tolerant and also the most acid-tolerant microbes on Earth — and they “wouldn't stand a chance in Venus."

While the latest findings veto Venus at least for water-based organisms, they identify another planet — Jupiter — with enough water in the clouds and the right atmospheric temperatures to support life.

“Now I'm not suggesting there's life on Jupiter and I'm not even suggesting life could be there because it would need the nutrients to be there and we can't be sure of that,” Hallsworth stressed to reporters. “But still it's a profound and exciting finding and totally unexpected.”

Further studies will be needed to ascertain whether microbial life might exist deep in the clouds of Jupiter, according to Hallsworth and NASA astrobiologist Chris McKay, a co-author on the research paper published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.

As for Venus, three new spacecraft will be headed there later this decade and early next — two by NASA and one by...