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Published January 8, 2021 | Supplemental Material + Published
Journal Article Open

Sulfur monoxide dimer chemistry as a possible source of polysulfur in the upper atmosphere of Venus

Abstract

The abundance of SO dimers (SO)₂ in the upper atmosphere of Venus and their implications for the enigmatic ultraviolet absorption has been investigated in several studies over the past few years. However, the photochemistry of sulfur species in the upper atmosphere of Venus is still not well understood and the identity of the missing ultraviolet absorber(s) remains unknown. Here we update an existing photochemical model of Venus' upper atmosphere by including the photochemistry of SO dimers. Although the spectral absorption profile of SO dimers fits the unknown absorber, their abundance is found to be too low for them to contribute significantly to the absorption. It is more likely that their photolysis and/or reaction products could contribute more substantively. Reactions of SO dimers are found to be important sources of S₂O, and possibly higher order S_nO species and polysulfur, S_n. All of these species absorb in the critical ultraviolet region and are expected to be found in both the aerosol and gas phase. indicating that in-situ high resolution aerosol mass spectrometry might be a useful technique for identifying the ultraviolet absorber on Venus.

Additional Information

© The Author(s) 2021. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Received 11 May 2020; Accepted 27 November 2020; Published 08 January 2021. This research was supported by NASA Grant P1969079 under subcontract to the Space Science Institute (SSI) and NASA grant NNX16AN03G to SSI. D.E. and D.B. (IKI) acknowledge funding from the Russian government (topic VENERA). D.E. acknowledges the support by the French Government Scholarship Vernadski for PhD students. Data availability: The model data and observational data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. Code availability: The code for the photochemical model written in Fortran and the post processing of the data written in Matlab is available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. Author Contributions: J.P.P., J.L., F.P.M., and Y.L.Y. contributed to the paper writing. J.P.P., J.L., and F.P.M. carried out the modelling work. E.M., D.E., and D.B. provided the data from Venus Express. Y.L.Y. supervised the research. The authors declare no competing interests. Peer review information: Nature Communications thanks Vladimir Krasnopolsky and the other, anonymous, reviewer for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.

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Published - s41467-020-20451-2.pdf

Supplemental Material - 41467_2020_20451_MOESM1_ESM.pdf

Supplemental Material - 41467_2020_20451_MOESM2_ESM.pdf

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Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 23, 2023