The secret of Venus, hidden in heat of night, identified
The second planet in our Solar System, which shines like a bright star when seen from the Earth and named after the Roman goddess of beauty, is the ever glowing Venus. Underneath its thick mantle of acid sulfuric clouds, at the surface 460 degrees Celsius are the rule. This temperature is kept by the greenhouse effect of a virtually carbon dioxide only atmosphere. Seventy kilometres above, one has to withstand a perpetual wind storm, the product of the so called Venus superrotation1. A team of researchers has come closer to explaining the link between these infernal features.
The research was led by the Instituto de Astrofisica e Ciencias do Espaco (IAstro2) and published in the journal, 'Atmosphere'. The study, led by Pedro Machado, of IAstro and Faculdade de Ciencias da Universidade de Lisboa (Ciencias ULisboa), presented the most detailed and complete set of measurements ever made of the speed of the wind in Venus parallel to the equator (zonal wind) and at the altitude of the bottom of the cloud deck. One of the novel results was the simultaneous measurement of the speed of the wind at two different heights 20 kilometres apart.
The team registered a difference in wind speed of about 150 kilometres per hour faster at the top of the clouds, which reinforced the hypothesis that energy is being transferred from the heat of the lower layers to the general circulation of the atmosphere.
"Winds accelerate as we move upward to increasing altitudes, but we don't know yet why," said Pedro Machado. "This study throws much light on this, because we managed to study the vertical component of the wind for the first time, that is, how the energy from the lower and hotter layers is carried up to the top of the clouds, where it leads to
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