Mystery Solved: Scientists Reveal What Powers Venus’s Supersonic Winds
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Venus has long been recognized as one of the most hostile
worlds in the Solar System, and its atmosphere is one of the biggest mysteries.
The planet’s thick clouds race around its surface at astonishing speeds—over 100
meters per second, nearly 60 times faster than Venus rotates. While
Venus spins so slowly that it takes 243 Earth days to complete one
rotation, its atmosphere races around the planet in only four days. This
bizarre phenomenon, known as superrotation, has puzzled scientists for
decades. Now, researchers believe they have finally pinpointed a major driver
behind these extreme winds.
Daily Heating Cycle Emerges as the Main Engine of Superrotation
A new study suggests that the enormous momentum powering
Venus’s upper-atmosphere winds is largely generated by a once-daily thermal
tide—a planetary-scale wave created by the Sun heating the atmosphere.
The finding comes from more than 20 years of measurements
gathered by ESA’s Venus Express and JAXA’s Akatsuki missions.
Scientists used radio-wave tracking to monitor atmospheric movement and
performed complex simulations to recreate Venus’s circulation patterns.
The results show that the diurnal (daily) thermal tide
transports momentum upward far more effectively than previously believed.
Earlier theories favored twice-daily tides, but the new analysis
demonstrates that the once-per-day solar heating cycle plays the dominant
role, especially in the Southern Hemisphere, which has been studied in
detail for the first time.
A Puzzle That Spanned Generations
The hunt for the source of Venus’s superrotation began back
in the 1960s when early probes first detected the atmosphere whipping around
the planet at breakneck speed. For decades, scientists debated how such a
sluggishly rotating world could maintain atmospheric motion so dramatically out
of sync with its surface.
Many ideas emerged—gravity waves, planetary-scale
circulation loops, and momentum transfers—but none fully explained
the observations.
This latest work ties together clues collected over years of
study and delivers the strongest evidence yet that daily solar heating is
the key to unlocking one of Venus’s most enduring mysteries.
#Venus #SpaceScience #AstronomyNews #PlanetaryScience
#SolarSystem #NASA #ESA #JAXA #SpaceResearch #CosmicDiscoveries #Astrophysics
#ScienceUpdate #VenusAtmosphere
