Scientists Model the True Darkness of Venus’s Mysterious UV Absorber

As any amateur astronomer can tell you, Venus is famous for its yellow coloration in visible light. But, ask a professional planetary scientist and they will tell you the strangest thing about Venus is how it appears in ultraviolet. In this spectrum, stark, high-contrast streaks are splattered across the planet’s cloud cover, and rotate on its four-day atmospheric rotation period. For over 100 years, scientists have wondered what could be causing those patterns, referring to an unknown “UV absorber”. A new paper, published in Astrobiology from Jan Spacek and an international team of researchers, hopes to answer that long-standing question by answering a simpler one - if you scooped Venus’ clouds into a test tube, how dark would they be?