Behind the thick, twirling cloud over the mysterious Venus
June 13th, 2016
This is an effort to give somewhat reasonable explanation to the problem posed on the Sunday evening "Science Zero" program on the NHK E-Television.
The Japanese Venus Climate Orbiter Akatsuki has been around the Venus orbit and started sending Infrared photos of Venus surface, behind the visible outermost clouds, revealing a thick layer of cloud is circulating around the surface at much faster speed than the original rotation of the planet herself.
The problem posed there is why thick layer of cloud can rotate so fast without evident source of rotation energy.
I hereby would like to present a layman's wild guess. I have no way to certify its novelty. I just wish it is unique and novel.
Let us begin with an assumption that the Venus's atmosphere at high pressure and temperature has a significant viscosity and stickiness that prevent physical strain from dividing a volume of atmosphere into ultimate molecular level. In short, it is supposed that it can maintain particle shape even under heat, pressure and physical strains.
When such a particle of Venus air at he bottom of the atmosphere is heated and thus gets lighter, it would start floating up. Then, with the stickiness, it is likely it would bring nearest particles one after another to make a rising thread.
Such threads must be fairly thin, but, consisting of indivisible particles, it is highly unlikely to get tangled with another thread of particles in the rising or sinking stream.
It is likely that the thread would maintain continuity until it reaches the bottom of the cloud. There its floating inertia is blocked and absorbed by the cloud and the thread turns to horizontal flow.
The thread thus makes heavy contact or collision with the cloud and its thermal energy is transferred to the cloud without blocking surface layer.
Thus getting cooler, it starts to sink toward the bottom.
As said before, the thread consists of indivisible particles, it is likely to reach the bottom maintaining thread continuity.
It is similar to the thermosiphon by natural convection.
Thus a quasi-tubular flow would be established between the bottom of the cloud and the depth of the atmosphere, virtually completing a fast and energy efficient circulation of thermal energy transfer, although much slower than the sonic speed.
When the thread hit the cloud, it is guided by the rotation of the cloud. So, the floating inertia of the thread would be absorbed by the cloud, resulting in a tiny, tiny acceleration of the cloud rotation if possible. It is likely that, each
acceleration being tiny, accumulation of numerous threads resulted in this significant effect.
This is my answer to the problem how the cloud is driven.
It's because of large scale thermosiphon quasi-tubular circulation flows.
Needless to say, the above is just a wildest fancy of a non-academic dreamer on the mysterious planet of Venus.
Nothing would be provable in the decades to come.
Toyourday (Takashi Toyoda)
