Greaves, Jane S  ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3133-413X, Rimmer, Paul B, Richards, Anita M S, Petkowski, Janusz J, Bains, William, Ranjan, Sukrit, Seager, Sara, Clements, David L, Silva, Clara Sousa and Fraser, Helen J
2022.
Low levels of sulphur dioxide contamination of Venusian phosphine spectra.
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
514
(2)
, pp. 2994-3001.
10.1093/mnras/stac1438
|
Preview |
PDF
- Accepted Post-Print Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (868kB) | Preview |
Abstract
New analysis is presented of the 1.1 mm wavelength absorption lines in Venus’ atmosphere that suggested the presence of phosphine. We retrieve a sulphur dioxide observation from the JCMT archive that was simultaneous within a few days of the PH3 1-0 spectrum obtained in 2017 June, and demonstrate via a radiative transfer calculation that contamination of PH3 by SO2 was ≈10 per cent. We also present ALMA 2019 spectra of PH3 1-0 and an SO2 transition acquired simultaneously, and infer that SO2 line-contamination was ≲2 per cent (for the least-noisy half of the planetary disc). The contamination-subtracted ALMA and JCMT spectra (of 6–8σ sigma confidence) are now consistent with similar absorption-depths at the two epochs. The two values span −1.9(±0.2) 10−4 of the continuum signal (which was re-estimated for ALMA), albeit for differing planetary areas. This suggests that the abundance attributed to phosphine in Venus’ atmosphere was broadly similar in 2017 and 2019.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Date Type: | Published Online |
| Status: | Published |
| Schools: | Schools > Physics and Astronomy |
| Publisher: | Oxford University Press |
| ISSN: | 0035-8711 |
| Date of First Compliant Deposit: | 27 January 2023 |
| Date of Acceptance: | 20 May 2022 |
| Last Modified: | 03 May 2023 20:03 |
| URI: | https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/156322 |
Actions (repository staff only)
 |
Edit Item |
Altmetric
Altmetric