Scientist have finally solved the mysterious ‘Y’ shape in the skies of Venus. A mystery that has baffled scientists for the past 50 years has finally been taken off the books of the unsolvable space theories. Venus has remained an elusive planet in terms of research due to its thick clouds that hide its surface, most of the earlier research has only been around its atmosphere are gaining a window into seeing whats on the surface has been fairly tough. It was actually through the research of the light wavelengths that the Y shape was discovered, it was a dark anomaly that spanned the equator of Venus and almost 17,000 kilometers in length.
What made it more spectacular was the fact that this Y shaped anomaly was not still, it was moved and that too at a different speed then that of Venus’s own rotation. While the surface of venus takes 243 days to spin on its axis, its atmosphere spins 60 times faster than its surface. Scientists have long though that this Y shape was caused in relation to waves that were in turn cause by its odd rotational behaviors of the surface and the skies. The scientists were spot on with the waves but the type of wave was none like they had seen before. This could only point to one thing which is a new kind of wave in the solar system that has previously been unknown.
Researchers finally cracked the mystery when they figured that this wave was absorbing ultra violet let and creating a dark anomaly. This new wave can also explain the bizarre shape of this dark structure. In the region stretching from the equator of Venus up to its middle latitudes, there is a strong wind that blows westward at more or less constant speeds. However, at higher latitudes near the poles of Venus, winds swirl more quickly. These differences mean “the wave gets gradually distorted,” leading to a Y shape as stated by Javier Peralta, a planetary scientist at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Granada, Spain
In addition, this new wave is confined not only to the equator of Venus, but also to the altitude where atmospheric winds are most intense, around the cloud tops of Venus. This could explain why the Y feature is only seen in a narrow range of altitudes no more than about 5 miles (8 km) in height.
These findings could shed light on the way other slowly rotating planets behave. “We expect that the number of slowly rotating exoplanets will shortly increase, and we already provided a list of up to 20 plausible candidates previously,” Peralta said.
Source: Space.com
