As we search for planets that might support life, we need to keep this in mind.
The howling, hurricane-force winds of Venus are blowing even faster lately, and scientists aren't sure why. Venus has a super-rotating atmosphere that whips around the planet once every four Earth days; Venus itself takes 243 Earth days to complete one rotation. Another hypothesis is that the hydrogen escaped from the atmosphere and most of the oxygen reacted with rocks on the surface of Venus over billions of years, with the rest being lost to solar wind.Although the solar wind and oxidation of rocks may be part of the answer, new results from the Imagine an ocean on Venus.
The team measured temperature and wind speeds in Venus' upper atmosphere by observing an infrared glow emitted by carbon dioxide (CO 2) molecules when they were energized by light from the sun. You will receive a verification email shortly.There was a problem. Future US, Inc. 11 West 42nd Street, 15th Floor, Infrared light is invisible to the human eye and is perceived by us as heat, but it can be detected by special instruments. Introduction Venus is the second planet from the Sun and our closest planetary neighbor. Is there water? But wind speeds drop closer to the surface, where they only move a few miles per hour. This means that the electric wind could be singlehandedly responsible for Venus’ missing water: the water would be gone even if the solar wind wasn’t around.With this discovery, we now know that electric wind can play a very important role in how hydrogen, oxygen, and other ions—including heavy ones—can escape from planetary atmospheres. The howling, hurricane-force winds of Venus are blowing even faster lately, and scientists aren't sure why. Together, these act like a greenhouse, trapping heat and warming the planet. The Venus Express launched near the end of 2005 and concluded its mission in December of 2014.A key moment came when an instrument onboard the Venus Express called an electron spectrometer (built by the Southwest Research Institute and led by University College London) found that the electrons escaping from the upper atmosphere of Venus were traveling more slowly than expected. The temperature is so hot that the water boils and steam rises. Similar in structure and size to Earth, Venus spins slowly in the opposite direction from most planets. In the journal article, they say that the strong electric wind is a persistent, stable, and global phenomenon on Venus.This isn’t just an interesting discovery; it has real impact on how Venus evolved.Things in the atmosphere, like things on the surface of the planet, are held down by gravity. "Although there is clear evidence that the average global wind speeds have increased, further investigations are needed in order to explain what drives the atmospheric circulation patterns that are responsible, and to explain the changes seen in localized areas on shorter timescales," Venus Express project scientist Håkan Svedhem said in a statement. A surface wind specification is needed for future landed missions to Venus. There are many factors that play into whether life as we know it can exist on a planet. The solar wind then supplies energy that gives some of these ions sufficient velocity to escape Venus's gravity field. There are some important differences, of course, like temperature: the average temperature on the surface of the Earth is about 60°F, while on Venus it’s closer to a toasty 860°F.
[The strange winds of Earth's "sister planet" have long intrigued researchers.
All of the positive and negative charges here interact, creating an electric force that surrounds Venus. However, when scientists look at the upper atmosphere of Venus, where the hydrogen and oxygen that made up the HUntil now, this was often blamed on solar wind. Venus Express observes the planet in a polar orbit that allows to perform a global study of the South hemisphere of Venus. New York, © This is hot enough that any water on Venus would have boiled off as steam ages ago. Is it primarily due to the distance from the sun, or is something else at work?For a great video highlighting this research, check out NASA's Electric Winds of Venus, below.Laser blasts and levitation team up to make testing water for heavy metals a cinch!When GPS isn't an option, scientists turned to physics to control and track swarms of underwater sensors.Sometimes, all it takes to unlock ancient secrets is to look at the problem in a new light.Support PhysicsCentral and help the PhysicsQuest program reach more classrooms! NY 10036. This can help us understand our own atmosphere better, and also teach us what to look for in planets outside of our own solar system.Venus is a lot like the Earth in several ways—size, gravity, mass, composition, and the presence of an atmosphere and weather systems. "The atmospheric super-rotation of Venus is one of the great unexplained mysteries of the solar system," Svedhem added. This erosion process results in a steady loss of low-mass hydrogen, helium, and oxygen ions, whereas higher-mass molecules, such as carbon dioxide, are more likely to be retained. What is the atmosphere like? "Our analysis of cloud motions at low latitudes in the southern hemisphere showed that over the six years of study the velocity of the winds changed by up 70 km/h over a time scale of 255 Earth days — slightly longer than a year on Venus," lead author Toru Kouyama, of the Information Technology Research Institute in Ibaraki, Japan, said in a statement.Both new studies also detected regular variations in the And both teams saw surprising and dramatic variations in wind speed, sometimes in as little as 24 hours. On Earth, seasons change based on …