Humans didn’t have an answer to how long a day lasts on Venus, but that has been changed with the latest reveal.
Humans have a deep interest in space, to know how it’s like on other planets has consumed much of the tax payer’s money over the years. However, what humans know most of an outward surface is of Mars. And even that is not much to say.
You must be wondering we should have known more about Venus given that the planet is next door to earth. But it’s not that simple, the thick layer of sulfuric acid clouds doesn’t let humans study more on the specifications of the planet. One to say, how long does a day last on Venus which just recently has been revealed
The researchers from the University of California finally have an answer to the question that what is the duration of a day on Venus and it took them as long as 15 years on earth to find out. Making use of radar to bounce back the signals of Venus’s surface they were able to find out not only the duration of a single day on the planet but also discovered about the size of its core and the axis at which it is tilted.
“Venus is our sister planet, and yet these fundamental properties have remained unknown,” said Jean-Luc Margot, a UCLA professor of Earth, planetary and space sciences who led the research, in a statement.
Most of the other planets spin in a similar direction to how the earth spins at its axis. In contrast, Venus rotation is another way around and spins so slow that one day on Venus lasts for 243.0226 days if we compare it with a single day on earth.
A single day’s duration on Venus keeps on fluctuating with the course of time, and this factor mainly hindered measuring a day’s duration. It also was the reason that previous findings varied from each other, said Margot. One hypothesis is that the thick atmosphere of the planet accounts for that change. They said its atmosphere rotates at a faster pace than compared to the planet itself, which could be the reason affecting the rotation through momentum.
“We use Venus as a giant disco ball,” said Margot. “We illuminate it with an extremely powerful flashlight—about 100,000 times brighter than your typical flashlight. And if we track the reflections from the disco ball, we can infer properties about the spin.”