Venus’s atmosphere is unexpectedly complex

Abstract

Spacecraft first measured the chemical makeup of Venus’s atmosphere in the 1960s. By the late 1970s, scientists agreed that available data suggested the Venusian atmosphere was uniformly 3.5% nitrogen gas up to 100 km above the surface. A new analysis of data collected from the planet’s atmosphere in 2007 has found N2 concentrations 40% higher than expected. The findings could lead to revised models of Venusian chemical and physical processes and could even influence how scientists study exoplanets (Nat. Astron. 2020, DOI: 10.1038/s41550-020-1079-2). “Venus is the nearest planet to Earth, but it’s one of the planets we know the fewest things about,” says Stephen Kane of the University of California, Riverside, an exoplanet and Venus researcher who wasn’t involved in the study. Because of that lack of data—especially direct measurements of chemicals in Venus’s atmosphere at different altitudes—he says he’s not surprised that existing atmospheric models are incomplete. But he