Emerging Astronomers – Is There Life on Venus?

We’ve changed our minds about that several times. In the 1950s we pictured a warm jungle world. Then multiple spacecraft found a surface at ~400°C that destroyed every lander we sent. Now the question has reopened, this time about Venus’s clouds, and about a chemical signal nobody can explain.

Tim Sol is a Year 11 student at Wentworth Computer Science College, Auckland, and the new leader of the AAS Junior sessions, having volunteered with the Society through 2026’s Matariki solar-telescope outreach. He is a 2025 “15@15 Youth Building Democracy” winner and placed 3rd in  the 2025 “Mars 2040” Space Competition (Arts & Business College of London). He founded and led his previous school’s Space Club and co-runs Open Process (a YouTube channel about engineering, robotics, and AI).