Venus's Mysterious Lower Haze Is Cosmic Dust, Study Finds
Study: Venus's lower haze is cosmic dust from meteorites that interacts with sulfuric acid and helps seed clouds.
The Venera and Pioneer Venus probes discovered the lower haze. Those spacecraft were some of the first to successfully send images of Venus back to Earth. The haze they observed remained without a confirmed source for decades.
The study says the haze is made 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, the interaction leaves behind a haze.
Planetary scientist Hiroki Karyu and his research team at Tohoku University in Sendai City, Japan, used a microphysical model to determine how the haze formed. 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 the study. “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.”