Venus is an unusually dynamic place. Powerful wind streams revolve around the planet, dragging dense cloud layers behind it. These winds move so swiftly that they show “super-rotation”: the earthly ones move with the fifth speed of the planet, while the winds of Venus overtake the planetary rotation 60 times.
Observations on the feature were obtained from the apparatus Venus Express (2006-2014) and other international spacecraft, which followed the peculiar behavior of the winds.
The side turned to the Sun is considered to be more mysterious because it displays invisible cloud types, shapes, and dynamics. It seems that the super-rotation behaves more erratically on the night side than on the day side. But climate models do not explain the reasons. Night clouds also form various patterns and shapes. They are larger, wavy, and more inhomogeneous, dominated by “fixed waves”. The latter rise inside the atmosphere and do not move with a planetary rotation, but are concentrated in higher-altitude areas of the surface. Three shots are taken with the visible and infrared camera of Venus Express. It shows stationary waves (left), dynamic instabilities (center) and mysterious filaments (right).
