With the planet under human observation since the 16th century, you would think that humans might know everything about Venus. A new discovery about the Earth¡¯s neighbour, however, is a blaring proof that nothing is far from the truth.
Just below the atmosphere of Venus, scientists have now discovered acid clouds that have been lurking around the planet since the past three decades. A research on the same has now been published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
The newly discovered clouds are suspended about 50 kilometers below the thick cloud tops of Venus and move at astonishing speeds, close to that of a commercial air jet on Earth. At times, these clouds stretch as far as 7,500 km across the equator and mid-latitudes of Venus.
The atmospheric feature has been eluding scientists for decades. It was, however, hinted at first in a recent observation by the Japanese Akatsuki spacecraft orbiting Venus since 2015. The spacecraft spotted what looked like an atmospheric wave extending over the entire planet.
To confirm the phenomenon, scientists had to conduct a new survey of archival footage of Venus. Through such footage captured from observatories including the Galileo National Telescope in the Canary Islands and the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii, scientists were able to determine that the cloud wall has been looming on Venus since 1983.
"We needed access to a large, growing and scattered collection of images of Venus gathered in recent decades with different telescopes," Pedro Machado, a researcher with Portugal's Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences and a co-author in the study, said in a statement.
The new research claims that the newly discovered cloud wall has been raging on the planet since 1983. As per the research, the cloud wall moves across the entire planet in a mere five days, gliding at a speed of 330 km per hour.
The reason behind the strange phenomenon is not yet known. It is, however, predicted that the feature can be a "Kelvin" wave, a class of atmospheric gravity waves, already observed at Venus.
Such gravity waves take place in a planet's atmosphere when winds move at high speed over static geological features like a mountain. The wind forced upwards by the geological feature then merges with a layer of stable air just above the feature.
Researchers also predict that the cloud wall might be responsible for the mysterious fast rotation in Venus' upper atmosphere.
The feature could potentially provide enough momentum and energy to propel the fast winds further up, said lead author of the study - Javier Peralta, an astrophysicist at the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), in a statement.