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OK, we have a lot to get through this week. We have a new president coming along, and even though this charlatan may well usher in the end times, he is certainly known for grabbing ratings (among other things). Also, last week, I promised to write about why I am having trouble with ‘Romance of three Kingdoms.” It is a book about deceit, trickery, and cruelty as the tools of leadership. Perhaps now is a good time to talk about its dark lessons. However before we get to any of that, today let’s take a quick trip off-world to our sister planet Venus (a planet which endlessly fascinates me) where some exceedingly strange developments have been in the works.
Venus is currently being monitored and observed by the Japanese Space Agency probe Akatsuki. On December 7th, 2015, the probe spotted a huge crescent wave 6,000 miles long in the atmosphere of Venus. The probe lost sight of the massive bow shaped phenomena as it moved through its orbit, and, when it returned to position a few days later, the wave was gone.
So what produces a 6,000 mile long super cloud on a planet already known for extreme fast moving clouds of sulfuric acid. Scientists theorize that this was a gravity wave. Gravity waves are not too be mistaken for the gravitational waves of deep space (which are caused by distortion of spacetime from supermassive objects). Instead a gravity wave is a wave propagated within a fluid (like air or liquid) through the effects of gravity. When water flows over a sandbar, gravity restores equilibrium on the other side–which causes a wave effect. This is a familiar pattern in all sorts of fluid dynamics–including clouds passing over mountains. It is believed that the giant crescent wave within the atmosphere of Venus originated from the atmosphere flowing over vast mountain ranges on the surface.
Even if this is not as unfamiliar a phenomena as it might deem when first hearing the name and looking at the pictures, it is very beautiful and it is appearing on a scale hitherto unknown in terrestrial parts (although the supermassive planets have their own bizarre cloud structures which put it to shame. for now lets just enjoy looking at the huge bow shaped cloud on the closest planet to Earth. Thanks JAXA for making this discovery! What will the strange hot caustic atmosphere of Venus do next?
ferrebeekeeper 