[ad_1]
What is the weather like at night on Venus? Scientists are finally finding out.
At only one planet, Venus is relatively close to Earth and we have been studying it for a long time, with the first Venusian probe reaching the planet in 1978. However, scientists know very little about the weather at night on Venus. . That is to say until now.
In a new study, researchers have come up with a new way to use infrared sensors on the Japanese climate orbiter Venus Akatsuki, a probe that arrived in orbit around Venus in 2015, to finally reveal the weather on the planet at night. These sensors found nocturnal clouds and strange patterns of wind flow.
Related: Photos of Venus, the mysterious planet next door
Like Earth, Venus is in the “habitable zone” of our sun, has a solid surface and an atmosphere that has time. To understand a planet’s weather, researchers study the movement of clouds in infrared light. However, while The atmosphere of Venus spinning fast, the planet itself has the slowest rotation of all the major planets in our solar system, which means day and night are long enough – about 120 earth days each.
Until now, only the weather on the “daylight side” of Venus was easily observable because, even in the infrared, it is difficult to have a clear view of the night side of Venus. There have been infrared observations of the “night side” of Venus, but these studies have not been able to clearly show the planet’s night time weather.
To explore this mysterious aspect of our neighboring planet, researchers turned to Akatsuki, the first Japanese probe to ever put another planet into orbit. The probe is designed to monitor Venus and its weather and has an infrared imager that does not need sunlight to “see”. Despite this design, the imager was unable to capture detailed observations of the night of Venus. However, by using a new analytical method to process the data captured by the imager, the researchers could indirectly “see” the elusive nighttime weather of Venus.
“Small-scale cloud patterns in direct images are faint and often indistinguishable from background noise,” co-author Takeshi Imamura, professor at the Graduate School of Frontier Sciences at the University of Tokyo, said in a press release.
“To see the details, we had to remove the noise,” he said. “In astronomy and planetary science, it is common to combine images to do this because the actual characteristics of a stack of similar images quickly mask noise. However, Venus is a special case because the entire weather system spins very quickly, so we had to compensate for this movement, known as super-spin, in order to highlight interesting formations to study. “
With this new method of analysis, the team observed the planet’s north-south winds at night and found something quite strange.
“What is surprising is that these are going in the opposite direction to their daytime counterparts,” Imamura said. “Such a dramatic change cannot occur without significant consequences. This observation could help us build more accurate models of the Venusian weather system which will hopefully resolve some long-standing unanswered questions about Venusian weather and possibly also. earthly time. “
Using this new method, the researchers believe that future studies could reveal new details about the weather on other planets like Mars or even our own planet Earth, according to the release.
As this work uses existing technology orbiting Venus, the planet will soon see three new missions arriving that will continue to expand our understanding of Venus and its climate. NASA recently announced two new missions to Venus, called DAVINCI + and VERITAS, and the European Space Agency has announced that it will launch the Envision mission to the planet. All three spacecraft will be launched at the end of this decade and early 2030s.
This job was described in a study published on July 21 in the journal Nature.
Email Chelsea Gohd at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
[ad_2]
Source link