The international team who discovered the planet-wide cloud in Venus described what they saw as an "atmospheric disruption" extending as far as 4,660 miles (7,500 kilometers). The cloud was traveling 200mph (320kmh) through the planet's upper atmosphere and had been happening since 1983.
Simply saying, that is about 61,000 football pitches, long enough to cover the width of the United Kingdom.
Dr. Pedro Machado, a scientist from the Institute of Astrophysics, said that this discovery is incredible and that if it were to happen on Earth, it would be a frontal surface at the scale of the planet.
An Epic, Planet-Scale Wave Has Been Hiding in The Toxic Clouds of Venus For Decades https://t.co/QOBBIgm5CN pic.twitter.com/z5f5osfNXp — Paulo Pereira (@Pauloaep) August 6, 2020
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Poisonous Tsunami in Venus
Venus is the second planet nearest to the sun and known for being a hostile planet unsuitable for life. The planet is enveloped with a thick atmosphere almost entirely of carbon dioxide rotating 60 times faster than Venus itself, producing strong winds.
Due to that, Venus is known to produce huge waves of gas, but no one has observed quite this huge wave before.
It was only recently that researchers discovered the strange atmospheric disruption after studying the infrared images taken by Japanese Venus orbiter Akatsuki from 2016 to 2018.
According to scientists, the huge wave is roughly 31 miles (50km) above the surface of Venus and has appeared on the planet every five days since 1983. The phenomenon is the first of its kind to be spotted at such low altitudes and has not been seen in any of the Solar System planets.
The Japanese Space Agency, JAXA, thinks that the huge gas wave could help solve mysteries surrounding the greenhouse effect happening in Venus. The wave occurred in the region responsible for the effect, which may help scientists understand the connection between Venus' surface and its turbulent atmosphere.
JAXA scientist Dr. Javier Peralta said that confirming the wave nature is critical since ultraviolet images only sense clouds at 70 kilometers in height.
They said that knowing the wave nature would help them find a wave transporting energy and momentum from below the atmosphere and dissipates before reaching the top of the clouds.
"It would, therefore, be depositing momentum precisely at the level where we observe the fastest winds of the so-called atmospheric super-rotation of Venus, whose mechanisms have been a long-time mystery," the scientists said.
But until now, they still do not know the mechanisms behind the cloud wave. They are doing more observations to shed light on this mysterious phenomenon.
The scientists published their study in Geophysical Research Letters.
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Venus May Have Been a Habitable Ocean Planet Before
According to the European Planet Society researchers, Venus may have been a habitable ocean planet some two to three billion years ago until a dramatic event happened 700 million years ago that changed 80% of the planet's surface.
Scientists believe that Venus maintained stable temperatures of around 20 to 50 degrees for around three billion years ago. But due to a series of events that happened on the planet, Venus had been covered with carbon dioxide since then.
More research is needed to confirm this theory and get a better idea of Venus's history and evolution.
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