Scientists solve Venus – The next closest planet to Earth is Venus, which is surrounded by dense clouds of sulfuric acid. This has puzzled researchers for many years until recently as to why such a large cloud system exists around Venus, some 3,700 miles wide and orbiting the planet with a remarkably sharp leading edge in just a few days.

It turns out that the answer has to do with simple physical processes happening in your kitchen sink! In a solar system record-breaker reported in the journal Geophysical Research: Planets, scientists at the University of Tokyo have employed numerical simulations to show how a very large atmospheric wave front can be generated by a major hydraulic jump, where a fast and shallow fluid flow slows and thickens, like water flowing from a tap on the bottom surface of a sink basin. On Venus, a planetary Kelvin wave travels eastward within Venus’s low clouds, destabilizes, and induces a powerful localized updraft, which raises vaporized sulfuric acid to great heights.

The vapor rises approximately 31 miles high and forms a massive cloud front. Why it matters beyond Venus It’s the first hydraulic jump ever found beyond Earth – and the largest known anywhere in the Solar System.

The discovery also sheds light on another enduring Venusian puzzle: Venus’s clouds rotate about 60 times faster than the planet itself. The momentum carried by the Kelvin wave is transferred to the mean flow via hydraulic jumps, which contributes to the maintenance of this extreme atmospheric superrotation – a coupling absent from all existing climate models. Incorporating this would require considerable supercomputing power, but it promises to significantly speed up preparations for future Venus missions and our broader understanding of planetary atmospheres.