The mystery of the wind in Venus
Venus is almost the Earth binocular as far as mass and size, and is probable that both planets also shared other many characteristics at the time of their formation. But 4,500 million years of evolution have made that the hottest world of the Solar System is today very different from the Earth, rich in phenomena that intrigue the investigators. One of them is the call superrotation, that consists of which the highest clouds of the venusiana atmosphere turn around the very many Venus more express than the own planet broken on itself. The Group of Planetary Sciences of the University of the Basque Country (UPV) has obtained new tracks to solve the mystery.
More than 30 Russian and American ships that have visited Venus from the Sixties there are developing an extreme planet in many senses. Broken Venus very slowly: it takes 224 days terrestrial in completing a turn. The densidad of its atmosphere makes that the pressure in their surface is 90 times the terrestrial one, equivalent to which there is to a kilometer of depth in the ocean. That atmosphere has enormous amounts of carbon dioxide, which brings about a rampant greenhouse effect that lifts the skin temperatures to the 450 degrees Celsius. The lead would be liquid in Venus. The dense sulfuric acid cloud layers complete hell that cover all the planet to between 45 and 70 kilometers with height.
The superrotation is a showy exotismo addition. In the sixty, the telescopes discovered that the part superior of the cloud layer moves very quickly, until the point of that completes a return to the planet in only four days terrestrial. Today one knows that the winds that drag clouds blow to 360 kilometers per hour.
The group of the University of the Basque Country, directed by Agustín Sanchez Lavega, has resorted now to the observations of the Venus Express ship, of the European Agency of the Space (THAT), to analyze winds in the venusiana atmosphere, and to determine his global structure in detail , they indicate the investigators. The results will help to interpret the mysterious phenomenon of the superrotation .
After taking images during the day and the night of Venus throughout several months, camera VIRTIS of Venus Express is developing, for example, that the intensity of winds varies based on the latitude. Thus, between the Equator and the average latitudes of Venus, the winds of the superrotation are constant, although in vertical, within the atmosphere, its speed falls with the height and happens of 370 kilometers per hour to 180 kilometers per hour. Outside the average latitudes of the planet the winds decrease until becoming null in the pole, where an immense vortex forms.
Also one has seen that, unlike which thought, the ultrarotation seems not to be constant in the time: We have detected fluctuations in its speed that not yet we understand , the investigators say. In addition, they have observed for the first time how the relative movement of the Sun on clouds, and the intense heat that deposits in them, causes that the superrotation is more intense to the dusk that to the dawn .
Nevertheless, the new data are not enough to solve this mystery. Not yet we are able to explain why a planet that turns so slow has much more intense hurricane global winds that the terrestrial ones, and in addition concentrates in the top to their clouds , comment Sanchez Lavega.
Very interesting