Venus' mysterious haze is actually cosmic dust
摘要
金星大气底部的黄色“低层雾霾”自20世纪70年代由探测器发现以来，数十年间成因未明。最新研究指出，这些雾霾实际源于宇宙尘埃：流星体在大气中燃烧后留下尘埃颗粒，硫酸与这些颗粒相互作用后形成雾霾。日本东北大学行星科学家Hiroki Karyu团队利用微物理模型揭示了其形成机制，认为持续流入的宇宙尘埃足以维持该雾霾层，且这些颗粒可作为凝结核促进云层形成。
Venus is shrouded in a veil of mystery. The yellowish “lower haze” at the bottom of its atmosphere was discovered by the Venera and Pioneer Venus probes in the 1970s. These spacecraft were some of the first to successfully send images of the planet back to Earth, but the haze they saw went unexplained for decades. Now the mystery Venus was keeping has been unveiled.
What nobody knew then was that the haze is an accumulation of particles from meteorites. “Shooting stars” that burn up in the atmosphere leave behind cosmic dust particles, and after sulfuric acid interacts with these particles, it leaves behind a haze. Planetary scientist Hiroki Karyu and his research team at Tohoku University in Sendai City, Japan, finally figured out how the haze formed using a microphysical model. This type of model involves microphysics—the micro-scale processes that create clouds and precipitation on Earth and other bodies.
“The continuous influx of cosmic dust is sufficient to sustain this lower haze layer with the particle size distribution observed by the entry probes,” Karyu said in a study published in Nature Astronomy. “These haze particles of cosmic origin act as efficient condensation nuclei, promoting cloud formation in the main cloud deck even far from their initial source.”
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