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Venus: What Makes It Reflect Radiation?

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What is it about Venus’s atmosphere that makes it reflect radiation? What is Venus’s atmosphere made of anyways? These were questions taken into consideration when John Patrick wrote his dissertation.
In his dissertation, Patrick said that there numerous possibilities provided by others that could cause the reflection of radiation by Venus, but with all those possibilities only one made sense. First thoughts were physical discontinuities in the clouds tops (Patrick 1). It was considered that there were holes in the clouds but proven to be wrong by Mariner 10. The next assumption was that the absorber that made the clouds slightly yellow also caused dark markings by absorbing ultraviolet (Patrick 1). Different compounds have been hypothesized to what causes the markings, etc. but none have been proven. Patrick states that, “It is in this paper that Young develops the novel idea that the temperature shift of the ultraviolet absorption edge of sulfur combines uniquely with the temperature to produce the wavelength dependence of the total reflectivity” (Patrick 3). All in all Patrick was saying throughout his dissertation that you …show more content…

Nitrogen exists in the smallest of amounts along with clouds of sulfuric acid. The heavy clouds that shield Venus, also prevent visible observations of the surface (Venus’s Atmosphere: Composition, Climate, and Weather, 2012).
Although, Venus is considered by many to be the twin to our planet, Earth, it’s almost impossible for that to be determined, there is much we don’t know about the planet, but what we do know, the information points to the fact that it’s not. There is no prefect day on Venus, first, because it is surrounded by dense layers of clouds that are forty miles thick. Venus does reflect about eighty percent of the Sun’s radiation, however, the carbon dioxide which is about ninety- five percent of the atmosphere traps in heat which practically bakes the

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