Giant Dust Ring Discovered Around Venus

Astronomers have found a giant dust ring encircling Venus and the planet orbits its path of 220 million kilometers around the sun enveloped in this thick cloud.

Astronomers found that the evening star, Venus has got a giant dust ring around it. The planet orbits the Sun enveloped in about 10-15 million kilometer- thick layer of dust.

This study was carried out by Open University researchers with Mark Jones as the lead researcher.

The newly discovered data will help scientists find out more about the dust clouds within our Solar System and also in other planetary systems. The inner solar system consists of dust called the zodiacal cloud, which is present between planets. This zodiacal dust is found  in the asteroid belt present in the solar atmosphere, placed roughly between Mars and Jupiter.

"This cloud is a prominent feature when you look from one of these space cameras, you can see this cloud very clearly, but it looks like a very smooth cloud, we don't see very much structure in it," said Mark Jones, of the Open University, in a press release. "What we've found is this ring near Venus which results from an interaction of that dust with the planets."

The zodiacal cloud takes about100,000 years to reach the Sun from the asteroid belt, some of the dust particles likely get captured in Venus' dust ring due to the planet's gravitational force and remain there for quite long.

"It makes this sort of structure in the dust cloud, this ring that goes all the way around the sun," Jones said. The findings are also put out in the journal Science.

The planet's dust ring was found to be around 10 percent thicker than the zodiacal cloud. The researchers used NASA's STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) mission to examine the dust ring.   

"It's too faint to see it from the surface of the Earth but if you could see it, it would stretch 45 degrees either side of the sun, it would fill half of the daytime sky," Jones said.

Understanding the behavior of dust systems would help the astronomers in capturing photos of planets around other stars with better resolution.

"Any dust rings in other systems might give a signal that scientists might incorrectly think is a planet. There are theoretical models of how to potentially take account of the dust but these need to be tested with experiments," the press release stated.

"You need to understand what these rings are doing in order to understand what these future exoplanet observations are like," said Jones.

"What this Venus ring will allow you to do is test some of those detailed models," Jones concluded.