Yesterday I got an email from Cosmoquest about a science press conference (“presser”) where a new discovery would be announced. With all the new distance-based communication technology anybody could watch, rather than just those in a select room, however large. The event was put on by the Royal Astronomical Society today. I watched it on the Cosmoquest Twitch TV channel. I had never heard of Twitch TV before.

The occasion was that

An international team of astronomers, led by Professor Jane Greaves of Cardiff University, today announced the discovery of a rare molecule – phosphine – in the clouds of Venus. On Earth, this gas is only made industrially, or by microbes that thrive in oxygen-free environments.

The discovery was made by spectroscopy using two different radio telescopes. The significance of this is that the production of phospine by purely chemical processes is very unlikely in the atmosphere of Venus. The team looked at every possible chemical reaction they could think up, and failed to find any that could come close to producing the observed amount of phospine.