Ring of dust found in resonant orbit near Venus

Discovery News : A huge cloud of dust 220 million km across has been found near Venus. The cloud is 10% denser than that which fills the rest of the solar system and is similar to a ring of dust found near Earth 20 years ago. Hints of a dust cloud near Venus had been found by several space missions in the past, including the Soviet Union’s Venera 9 and 10 in the 1970s. Mark Jones of the Open University in the UK and his colleagues used NASA’s STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory) probes to look for increased scattering of the Sun’s light and found the ring of dust in a resonant orbit with Venus. Both the cloud near Venus and that near Earth appear to be made of interplanetary dust trapped by the planets’ gravity. The dust cloud structures are likely very old, but the material they contain probably doesn’t stay in the cloud for more than a few hundred thousand years. That means it won’t provide clues about the formation of the solar system, but it may be a source of information on the nature of interplanetary dust, which comes from asteroids and comets.