Phosphine Discovered In A Brown Dwarf’s Atmosphere For The First Time

Phosphine has caused quite a stir in the astronomical world lately. That was largely due to its (still hotly debated) detection in the atmosphere of Venus. While the only known way for phosphine to be created on terrestrial worlds, like Venus, is through some sort of biological origin, it is relatively common among larger gas giants and even “brown dwarfs” – failed stars larger than Jupiter but not quite large enough to start their own hydrogen fusion process. Previously, we hadn’t yet seen phosphine in the atmosphere of brown dwarf in other solar systems, but a new paper from a diverse group of researchers, available in pre-print form on arXiv, used data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to find it for the first time. They also realized the mechanism that made it so hard to spot in the first place – the object’s metallicity.