Data from NASA’s Magellan spacecraft and Pioneer Venus Orbiter is used in an undated composite picture of the planet Venus.
| Photo Credit: Reuters
Oxygen accounts for about 21% of Earth’s air, with the remaining of our atmosphere primarily nitrogen. And most residing issues—together with individuals, as we effectively know—want oxygen to outlive.
Earth’s planetary neighbor Venus gives fairly a special story. Its thick and noxious atmosphere is dominated by carbon dioxide—96.5%—with lesser quantities of nitrogen and hint gases. Oxygen is almost absent. In reality, with Venus getting far much less scientific consideration than different planets similar to Mars, the direct detection of its oxygen has remained tough.
Using an instrument aboard the SOFIA airborne observatory—a Boeing 747SP plane modified to hold an infrared telescope in a joint undertaking between NASA and the German Aerospace Center—scientists have now detected atomic oxygen in a skinny layer sandwiched between two different layers of the Venusian atmosphere.
They famous that this atomic oxygen, which consists of a single oxygen atom, differs from molecular oxygen, which consists of two oxygen atoms and is breathable.
The researchers straight detected oxygen for the primary time on the aspect of Venus going through the solar—the place it truly is produced in the atmosphere—in addition to detecting it on the aspect going through away from the solar, the place it beforehand was noticed by a ground-based telescope in Hawaii. Venus rotates rather more slowly than Earth.
“The Venus atmosphere is very dense. The composition is also very different from Earth,” stated German Aerospace Center physicist Heinz-Wilhelm Hübers, lead writer of the research printed in the journal Nature Communications.
The thick atmosphere on the second planet from the solar traps in warmth in a runaway greenhouse impact.
“Venus is not hospitable, at least for organisms we know from Earth,” Hübers added.
The oxygen is produced on the planet’s day aspect by ultraviolet radiation from the solar that breaks down atmospheric carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide into oxygen atoms and different chemical substances, the researchers stated. Some of the oxygen is then transported by winds to the Venusian night time aspect.
“This detection of atomic oxygen on Venus is direct proof for the action of photochemistry – triggered by solar UV radiation – and for the transport of its products by the winds of Venus’ atmosphere,” stated astrophysicist and research co-author Helmut Wiesemeyer of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany.
“On Earth, our life-protecting stratospheric ozone layer represents a well-known example of such photochemistry,” Wiesemeyer added.
On Venus, there’s a layer of clouds containing sulfuric acid as much as a top of about 40 miles (65 km) above the planetary floor, with hurricane-force winds blowing in the other way of the planet’s rotation. About 75 miles (120 km) above the floor, sturdy winds blow in the identical route because the planet’s rotation.
The oxygen was discovered to be concentrated between these two ferocious layers, at an altitude about 60 miles (100 km). The oxygen’s temperature was discovered to vary from about minus 184 levels Fahrenheit (minus 120 levels Celsius) on the planet’s day aspect to minus 256 levels Fahrenheit (minus 160 levels Celsius) on its night time aspect.
Methods used beforehand to detect Venusian oxygen on the day aspect have been oblique, primarily based on measurements of different molecules in mixture with photochemical fashions.
Venus, with a diameter of about 7,500 miles (12,000 km), is barely smaller than Earth. In our photo voltaic system, Earth resides comfortably throughout the “habitable zone” across the solar—the space thought-about not too shut and never too removed from a star to have the ability to host life, with Venus close to the interior boundary and Mars near the periphery.
“We are still at the beginning of understanding the evolution of Venus and why it is so different from Earth,” Hübers stated.
