Venus' mysterious haze is actually cosmic dust

What happened

The yellowish “lower haze” at the bottom of its atmosphere was discovered by the Venera and Pioneer Venus probes in the 1970s. Now the mystery Venus was keeping has been unveiled.

Venus is shrouded in a veil of mystery. These spacecraft were some of the first to successfully send images of the planet back to Earth, but the haze they saw went unexplained for decades.

What nobody knew then was that the haze is an accumulation of particles from meteorites. “Shooting stars” that burn up in the atmosphere leave behind cosmic dust particles, and after sulfuric acid interacts with these particles, it leaves behind a haze.