No phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus

The detection of phosphine (PH₃) has been recently reported in the atmosphere of Venus employing mm-wave radio observations (Greaves et at. 2020). We here demonstrate that the observed PH₃ feature with JCMT can be fully explained employing plausible mesospheric SO₂ abundances (~100 ppbv as per the SO₂ profile given in their figure 9), while the identification of PH₃ in the ALMA data should be considered invalid due to severe baseline calibration issues. We demonstrate this by independently calibrating and analyzing the ALMA data using different interferometric analysis tools, in which we observe no PH₃ in all cases. Furthermore, for any PH₃ signature to be produced in either ALMA or JCMT spectra, PH₃ needs to present at altitudes above 70 km, in stark disagreement with their photochemical network. We ultimately conclude that this detection of PH₃ in the atmosphere of Venus is not supported by our analysis of the data.