Shortly after entering Venus' orbit in December 2015, the Japanese probe Akatsuki Orbiter captured a strange atmospheric phenomenon: a gravitational wave in the planet's upper cloud layer. The observations amazed scientists – it turned out that the waves in the atmosphere of Venus can be the largest of all existing in the solar system.
Despite the fact that it looks like a giant ripple on the surface of Venus, astrophysicists advise not to compare this phenomenon with the recently discovered gravitational waves resulting from the collision of black holes. Gravitational waves are quite common in nature and their effect on clouds and oceans can be observed with the naked eye. They occur when the flow of the atmosphere or water body is disturbed, that is, when, for example, tides flow through a sandbank, or air passes through a mountain range, gravity tries to restore balance, resulting in a wave effect.
Apparently, it was just such a physical process that caused a wave with a length of 10 thousand kilometers, which passed over the entire surface of Venus. The analysis showed that the phenomenon was formed by the fact that the atmospheric thick cloud of sulfuric acid rotated faster than the planet itself, and details in the topography of the surface caused disturbances as a result of which this large-scale gravitational wave was created.
“We report that with the help of the Japanese Akatsuki orbiter on the upper level cloud of Venus, in infrared and ultraviolet images, we were able to detect an interhemispheric arcuate structure with a length of 10 thousand km.” published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
