Thanks to a thick layer of cloud cover trapping in heat, Venus is the hottest planet in our solar system, with temperatures boiling over at 850 degrees Fahrenheit (454 C). But in a study published last week in NaturePhysics, the European Space Agency found something surprising at the planet’s poles: temperatures more frigid than anywhere on Earth.
Even though ESA lost contact with the Venus Express probe two years ago after it ran out of fuel, the agency is still working through the data it returned. As the first spacecraft to explore our nearest neighbor since 1989’s Magellan mission, the probe revealed much about that world. Many of the observations were made through plunging the craft into the atmosphere above the poles, where the probe encountered an atmosphere thinner than previously modeled, and filled with choppy atmospheric gravity waves, ripples caused by transfers of momentum between layers in the atmosphere.
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