A gritty dust ring circling the sun along the orbit of Venus has just been revealed to the finest detail thanks to instruments worn by the Parker Solar Probe.
The pristine, white-light images, taken from the orbit of Venus, show the ring in its entirety. This is essential data for understanding this ring and the dynamics of the Solar System and its gravitational interactions.
“This is the first time that a circular dust ring in the inner solar system can be revealed in its full glory in ‘white light’ images,” said astronomer Guillermo Stenborg of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. “I find it quite special.”
(Stenborg et al.)
The solar system is really a dusty place. The whole thing formed from dust (and gas); much of the dust is integrated into planets and asteroids and whatnot (not to mention the sun); often it is shaken back again.
Asteroids and comets are like cosmic salt and pepper shakers and sprinkle their surrounding space wherever they go. Recent research has found that Mars can spray the good everywhere during the great, global storms that occur every year.
All that dust can just float around, but sometimes it can be picked up in an orbiting resonance with a planet; that is, it orbits the same orbit, with an orbital period having a singular relationship with that of the planet.
The earth has a significant resonant dust ring; scientists have recently found evidence that Mercury also has one. And Venus’ dust ring has been known for some time and even partially observed by the German-American solar mission Helios and NASA’s solar mission STEREO.
Provides the Parker Solar Probe, equipped with a tool called the Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR). WISPR is made up of two visible light-forming helioferphic imaging systems designed to image the interplanetary medium studying the solar wind – the constant stream of charged particles emanating from the sun.
Because interplanetary matter is so bright with reflected sunlight, it exceeds the solar wind, and therefore special image processing is applied to remove the background noise at solar wind observations. It also means that WISPR is uniquely able to observe Venus’ resonance dust ring.
During normal operations, of course, the dust ring will be automatically extracted from the data. Parker performed a number of moving maneuvers in August and September 2019 to drive the momentum, which caused the WISPR cameras to move – and a bright line appeared in the resulting images.
At first, astronomers thought it was something else, like a glowing helmet streamer shooting from an active region of the sun, or even an image processing error. It was way too big to be a helmet streamer, and image processing options were also ruled out. The next step was to look at what else was in space, and then they found that the line matched Venus’ orbit perfectly.
Since the glow also corresponds to the distribution of light through dust, the team concluded that the most likely explanation is the resonant dust ring of the planet.
The data can be very useful. Scientists believe that interplanetary matter may be a transport mechanism for molecules within the solar system, a way in which materials dropped from asteroids or comets move to other bodies.
We still do not know how these dust rings formed, or where they came from, so the more information we have, the closer we can get to it.
“One idea is that the dust rings are naturally formed from the primeval cloud, but several researchers claim that the gravity of each planet has gradually trapped the particles, perhaps even asteroids or cometic particles within its orbit,” said US Naval astrophysicist Russell Howard. Research Laboratory explained. .
Another possibility is that the fabric rings are constantly turned over; collisions between grains can kick some of the old dust out of orbit, while new dust arrives from elsewhere.
There is also another mystery with the Venus ring. According to the analysis of the data from previous observations, there was much more dust in Venus’ resonant circuit than could easily be explained. A research team recently did modeling and determined that the best explanation for the amount of dust is a group of invisible asteroids that share the orbit of Venus.
We still have not found the asteroids, so the hypothesis is far from confirmed. Who knows, maybe Parker will spot them; or perhaps sin will lead us to another explanation for the phenomenon. Either way, it’s going to be exciting.
“We learn things about the dynamics, the exchange of dust particles in the heliosphere that we did not know before Parker Solar Probe,” Stenborg said.
The research was published in The Astrophysical Journal.