agencies
Tuesday, March 28, 2023 08:00 PM
Scientists from the University of Seville, in collaboration with experts from the University of the Basque Country, have led the first detailed study of the evolution of cloudiness Venusa giant atmospheric wave that looks like a tsunami, according to the RT report.
A tsunami spreads quickly The deepest clouds on the planetwhich is believed to play a very important role in accelerating the movement of the atmosphere of Venus, according to astronomers.
The observations were carried out non-stop for more than 100 days, and generally in areas where the wind has the same or greater wave speed, it acts as a physical wall or “barrier” that interrupts the propagation of that wave.
In this way, the discontinuity tries to spread upwards from the deep clouds, but the winds on Venus gradually increase with altitude, being an obstacle in its path and causing it to eventually dissipate.
However, the paper published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics revealed that the outage was able to spread for a few hours to about 70 km above the surface of Venus, in the upper clouds, according to Javier Peralta, a researcher at the University of Seville and a member of the Akatsuki mission, from the Japanese Space Agency. , which allows observing the highest clouds of Venus.
The ultraviolet images taken by the UVI camera aboard the Japanese Akatsuki mission reflect the fact that the disturbance before the outage was able to spread for a few hours over the surface of Venus, and this, according to Peralta, “is surprising, because until now the outage appeared trapped in the deepest clouds and we had never noticed it on Earth.” This high altitude.
Scientists were surprised when they measured the winds in the high clouds, because during their observations they found that it was several times slower than the outage itself.
This fact made it possible to explain how the discontinuity could propagate to higher altitudes, since since there are only weak winds in the higher elevations, it could travel through more regions in the atmosphere until it finds regions with the same speed and dissipates.
In general, areas where the wind has the same speed as the wave acts as a physical “barrier” to the propagation of that wave.
The team explains: “Measurement of the winds on Venus is necessary to try to explain why the atmosphere of Venus rotates 60 times faster than the surface. This atmospheric phenomenon is known as superspin. It also occurs on Saturn’s moon Titan and on many exoplanets, but after more than half a century of research, we still can’t explain it satisfactorily.”
