Lurking just below the atmosphere of Venus is a wall of sour clouds sweeping around the planet at speeds close to those of a commercial air jet on Earth.
The newly discovered atmospheric “feature” lies approximately 31 miles (50 kilometers) below the thick cloud heads of Venus and is extensive, and sometimes extends up to 4,660 miles (7,500 km) over the equator and center latitude of Venus. And it’s been there for at least three decades.
It may seem strange that such an enormous function went so unintentionally for so long, seeing that spaceflight have visited Venus sporadically since 1962, and high-resolution telescopes have been observing the planet for years. And the first hint that something strange happened came from the Japanese spaceship Akatsuki that has been around Venus since 2015.
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It has a new survey named archival material, however, to determine that the cloud wall has been there since at least 1983. “We needed access to a large, growing and widespread collection of images of Venus collected over the last few decades using various telescopes,” said co-author Pedro Machado, a researcher at Portugal’s Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences. said in a statement.
The archive material came from observatories including the Galileo National Telescope in the Canary Islands and the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii.
Enormous cloud patterns in the upper atmosphere are already known at Venus, including a bizarre “Y” shape that can arise from centrifugal forces, en arc wave that could be caused by airflow over static ground functions such as mountains. However, the newly discovered cloud wall is located at a lower altitude and in a region of the atmosphere of Venus, where the glass garden effect is quite pronounced, and maintains the surface at lead-melting temperatures of 870 degrees Fahrenheit (465 degrees Celsius).
Researchers suggest that the cloud wall could be linked to the mysterious and long observed rapid rotation in the upper atmosphere of Venus. The newly discovered feature could potentially dump enough momentum and energy to further fuel the rapid winds, said lead writer Javier Peralta, an astrophysicist at the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA, which carries out the Akatsuki mission), said in the same statement . This is because the cloud wall zooms above the surface at jet-like speeds of 323 km (h) per hour.
What caused the cloud wall is not yet known and will require further investigation, the team said. However, the researchers added, the feature could be an atmospheric “Kelvin” wave, a class of atmospheric gravitational waves that already observed at Venus. Gravity waves in the atmosphere of a planet (not to be confused with gravity waves) occur when high-speed winds move over static geological features such as a crater wall or a mountain; it updrafts upwards and sinks into a layer of stable air just above the function.
A study based on the study was published in the journal on May 27 Geophysical research letters.
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