Venus' mysterious night side revealed

The study shows that the atmosphere on

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Venus' night side behaves very differently to that on the side of the planet facing the Sun (the 'dayside'), exhibiting unexpected and previously-unseen cloud types, morphologies, and dynamics - some of which appear to be connected to features on the planet's surface.

"This is the first time we've been able to characterise how the atmosphere circulates on the night side of Venus on a global scale," says Javier Peralta of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Japan, and lead author of the new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy. "While the atmospheric circulation on the planet's dayside has been extensively explored, there was still much to discover about the night side. We found that the cloud patterns there are different to those on the dayside, and influenced by Venus' topography."

Venus' atmosphere is dominated by strong winds that whirl around the planet far faster than Venus itself rotates. This phenomenon, known as 'super-rotation', sees Venusian winds rotating up to 60 times faster than the planet below, pushing and dragging along clouds within the atmosphere as they go. These clouds travel fastest at the upper cloud level, some 65 to 72 km above the surface.

https://phys.org/news/2017-09-venus-mysterious-night-side-revealed.html