Venus was the Roman God of Love and it is the second planet from the Sun. It looks like a hanging diamond in the twilight after Sunset. The planet Venus is stunningly beautiful in the night sky.
Recently, astronomers have built up a detailed picture of Venus's atmosphere. They said Venus, has a second wind which is blowing from the equator towards to the poles. In fact, this wind is helping to find out the biggest mystery of planet's atmosphere and how it rotates so fast.
Most of the planets rotate anti-clockwise direction but Venus rotates clockwise once every 243 Earth days. But the speed of those winds is 400 kilometers per hour parallel to the equator. Scientists said to maintain this frenzy, energy from Sunlight is needed. Though it was not clear how energy could arrive where it was needed, as reported by New Scientist.
The speed of newly detect meridional wind is around 80 kilometers per hour. It could pull some of that energy away from the equatorial regions, spreading it more evenly throughout the atmosphere. Astronomical observer Pedro Machado uttered that it was difficult to understand how the atmosphere could maintain these speeds at high latitudes.
Machado and his collogues were able to see the winds using Doppler Effect. An information shared by Science Direct, is that it is just a siren's sound that changes pitch as it moves towards or away. But the Doppler Shift is tiny in the case of Venus's Cloud. To observe it the team studied sunlight from Venus cloud, which is being dragged along by those winds.
However, to detect the clouds' motion and the kindred wind, Machado and colleagues compared the Doppler-shifted light with that known signature. Now scientist received the hints of meridional circulation from the Venus Express Spacecraft.
They are using Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope to measure the winds in both hemispheres. According to scientist Ricardo Hueso, meridional circulation is one of the key elements that help to find out the working principle of the atmosphere in Venus.
