According to astronomers, this planet water is not available due to a very strong “electric winds”.
Modern Venus is devoid of any significant reserves of water for the reason that its atmosphere raging unusually strong “electric wind”, carrying moisture molecules in space, according to a paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
“This is an amazing and shocking thing. We never could have imagined that the electric wind can be so strong that it literally sucks the oxygen from the atmosphere into space. Check its availability should be one of the points in the search for habitable worlds around other stars,” said Glyn Collinson (Glyn Collinson) from space flight Center of NASA Goddard in Greenbelt (USA).
Collinson and his colleagues for several years studying data about the atmospheres of the planets of the Solar system that met different active or decommissioned onshore satellites probes Mars Express and MAVEN in orbit of Mars, and the probe “Venus Express orbiting Venus.
In this and in another case, scientists were interested in, essentially, one and the same question – where did the water and the atmosphere from the surface of Mars, and the water from the atmosphere and surface of Venus. In the case of Mars, as scientists had suspected, and as recently shown by the data guardian, the reason for data loss was considered the so-called “electric wind.”
From the point of view of physics, it represents an unusual form of air movement that occurs due to the appearance of ions in the atmosphere under the influence of an electric field of the planet, and their movement in the direction of the current sources with opposite charge. The movement of ions drags the neutral molecules, resulting in weak, but well-marked “wind.”
It tells Collinson, nobody believed that this electric wind can be somehow involved in the disappearance of water from Venus, whose air of tens to hundreds of thousands of times contains less water than the Earth’s atmosphere. Scientists assumed that the water carried away with the “morning star” in other ways, for example, as a result of its “bombing” particles of the solar wind.
Data collected by the instrument ASPERA-4 on Board Venus-Express” revealed that it’s actually not so – it turned out that the electric field of Venus was at least five times stronger than its counterpart from the Earth. The strength of this field, according to the calculations of researchers, should be enough to ensure that they generated a “electric wind” could capture the relatively heavy ions of oxygen and carry them into the interplanetary medium.
According to Collinson, planetary scientists still don’t know why the electric field of Venus is much stronger than his earth “cousin”. According to scientists, this may be due to the fact that it is much closer to the Sun than the Earth, so the atmosphere “morning star” gets about two times more ultraviolet light than our planet.
Similar processes, as noted by geologist, can occur on other planets, orbiting distant stars. The presence of such winds on the analogues of the Earth in the area of life other luminaries can make them dull and unfit for habitation, in spite of compliance with all formal criteria, which should encourage planetary scientists take a cautious approach to finding twins of our planet, conclude the authors.
