Speedy winds on Venus getting faster
Revving up Already travelling at super-hurricane speeds, winds on Venus have accelerated by an astonishing one-third over the past six years.
Separate teams of astronomers analysed images from European Space Agency's (ESA) Venus Express orbiter, monitoring cloud patterns on our closest neighbour.
When Venus Express started operations in 2006, high-altitude winds between latitudes 50 degrees either side of the equator were recorded at about 300 kilometres per hour on average, they found.
These winds have progressively increased and now are running at almost 400 kilometres per hour.
The study, published in the journal Icarus was carried out by a team led by Igor Khatuntsev from the Space Research Institute in Moscow, while another study similar led by Toru Kouyama of Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology appears in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
Just a fraction smaller than Earth, Venus was once touted as a sister planet to ours and, in early science fiction was portrayed as a potential home from home.
But in 1970, it was found to host an atmosphere of carbon dioxide with a pressure 90 times that on Earth and a surface cooked to 457°C, possibly the result of runaway global warming.
Its wind system is a yellowish brew of toxic gases that reach their highest speed at the altitude of the cloud tops, some 70 kilometres above the scorching volcanic plains.
These winds are especially intriguing because they are 'super-rotating', meaning that they travel dozens of times faster than the planet's spin.
The rotation of Venus is agonisingly slow -- it takes the equivalent of 243 Earth days to complete a single Venusian day.
"This is an enormous increase in the already high wind speeds known in the atmosphere," says Khatuntsev.
"Such a large variation has never before been known on Venus, and we do not yet understand why this occurred."
Khatuntsev's team measured how cloud features in the Venus Express images moved between frames by painstakingly tracking 45,000 features by hand, and a further 350,000 features using a computer program.
The Japanese-Swedish team relied solely upon their own automated cloud tracking method to derive the motion from images taken about one hour apart, at latitudes between 55°S and 70°S.
Researchers agree further work is needed to explain the bizarre increase in wind speeds, and whether this phenomenon is long-lasting.
"The atmospheric super-rotation of Venus is one of the great unexplained mysteries of the solar system," says Håkan Svedhem, ESA's Venus Express project scientist.
"These papers increase the number of questions that we need to answer … which is one of the great unexplained mysteries of the solar system."