Astronomers have discovered mysterious rings on Venus that weren't supposed to be there
Astronomers have discovered an unusual phenomenon in Venus’s atmosphere that has never before been observed on this planet. It consists of enormous concentric rings that span a significant portion of its illuminated side.
The unusual structure was captured using an experimental instrument mounted on the William Herschel Telescope in the Canary Islands. It turns out that the rings are visible only in polarized light, which makes understanding their nature even more challenging.
Scientists have been trying for several years to figure out how this phenomenon arose and why it exists in Venus’s atmosphere at all. The new discovery may help unravel one of the planet’s greatest mysteries. The study’s results were published in *The Planetary Science Journal*.
The ExPo experimental instrument detected polarized light in Venus’s atmosphere. Since light becomes polarized as it scatters through gas and dust, the instrument was able to reveal subtle atmospheric features of the planet that would otherwise have remained hidden.
While analyzing the data, astronomers discovered something strange—large concentric rings in Venus’s atmosphere that shouldn’t be there. Scientists concluded that these rings may be related to atmospheric waves. Simulations showed that changes in the density of Venus’s upper atmosphere, caused by atmospheric gravitational waves, can form such rings.
Atmospheric gravitational waves can propagate through a planet’s atmosphere, compressing and expanding the gas as they travel. On Venus, they can extend for thousands of kilometers, transferring energy between different layers of the atmosphere.
The rings detected by scientists are not the waves themselves, but rather the trail of polarized light left by small changes in density as the waves propagate through Venus’s dense atmosphere.
The exact mechanism behind the formation of these waves remains unclear. Scientists believe they may be the Venusian atmosphere’s response to solar radiation.
Astronomers note that it still needs to be confirmed whether large concentric rings actually exist in Venus’s atmosphere. But if they do exist, they could help solve one of Venus’s mysteries.
Scientists believe that atmospheric waves play an important role in sustaining the planet’s peculiar rotation, during which winds travel across the entire planet in 4 Earth days, even though the planet itself completes a full rotation on its axis in 243 Earth days.
ScienceAlert reports on this.
