Biological Agent Phosphine Found on Venus

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Things get worse

The data used to make the discovery of phosphine on Venus in September has been removed, temporarily, from the online archive because of an error in the early processing stages.

It's unclear if this error had any impact on the phosphine measurement, but if people find errors related to data used for unexpected measurements it's always a bad sign.

 

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The sociology of astronomy, where you have an instrument team (considered "mere technicians") who operate the telescope and do the calibration and analysis teams (considered "real scientists") who then do the very final analysis steps, lends itself to these kinds of problems.

 

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Particle physics keeps mixing these tasks, but these issues can still happen. OPERA's superluminal neutrinos were a calibration problem. Maybe the communication is better, I don't know astronomy well enough for a comparison.

 

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OPERA's superluminal neutrinos were a calibration problem

One ultimately found by the collaboration, and not any of the hundreds of people outside the collaboration looking at their data.

 

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People get more direct with criticism:
No phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus

They say the weaker JCMT can come from SO2 and largely come to the same conclusion as the earlier arXiv submission for the ALMA spectrum (no overlap in the author lists).