Today I’m going to be talking about hot and hellish planet right next to earth: Venus.

Venus, the second

planet from the sun, is named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty and is the only planet named
after a female, which is slightly upsetting. Venus may have been named after the most beautiful deity of
the Roman pantheon because it shone the brightest among the five visible planets known to ancient
astronomers.

Other ancient civilizations studied Venus as well, since it is actually the third brightest object in the sky,
following the sun and the moon. Its appearances were recorded by the Babylonians, who equated it
with the goddess Ishtar, about 3000 BCE, and it also is mentioned prominently in the astronomical
records of other ancient civilizations, including those of China, Central America, Egypt, and Greece.

Venus was also often thought to be two different stars just like Mercury was originally thought to be. It
was an evening star and a morning star basically a set of two stars, one that first appeared at sunset and
one that appeared sunrise. In Latin, they were respectively known as Vesper and Lucifer. But in Christian
times, Lucifer, or "light-bringer," became known as the name of Satan before his fall, and people
decided to distance the pretty planet from such an evil being. However, further observations of Venus in
the space age show a very hellish environment, so perhaps the name was fitting after all. Unfortunately,
this toxic environment makes Venus a very difficult planet to observe from up close, because spacecraft
do not survive long on its surface.

At 67 million miles from the sun, Venus is also often called Earth’s twin because it is actually only a little
bit smaller than earth, with a radius of 3,760 miles. That’s only a 198-mile difference, which is pretty
tiny. The planets also have similar densities and hence have similar gravities, with Venus’s acceleration
due to gravity coming out to be around -8.9 m/s2. For reference, Earth’s acceleration due to gravity is -
9.8 m/s2.

But in some ways the planet is Earth’s opposite. It spins backwards, has a day that is 243 earth days
long, and has a year that is 225 earth days long. That means one day on Venus is actually longer than a
year on the planet! This makes Venus the slowest planet out of the 8. Also, due to its backwards
rotation, on Venus the sun would seem to rise from the west and set to the east, the opposite of what
things look like here on Earth. It also has no seasons whatsoever, since it only has an axis tilt of 3
degrees which barely causes any changes to the climate. It also differs from earth in terms of its
characteristics, as while Earth is a gentle planet, with mild temperatures and the opportunity for life,
Venus is the exact opposite, with a surface temperature of 900 degrees Fahrenheit and a toxic
atmosphere

Because these planets are so different, yet so close to each other, one may think that something may
have happened during the formation of these two planets to account for their difference. We know that
both Earth and Venus formed out of particles of matter grouping themselves together, but scientists
think that the types of material and particles that grouped together to form Venus were sharply
different from those that formed the Earth, which helps explain why the two planets are now so
different.

I keep talking about how Venus is so different from the earth, without telling you much about it. I
promise I will, but first I want to start with the inside of Venus, which is actually pretty similar to the
earth. The interior of Venus is made of a metallic iron core that's roughly 2,400 miles wide. Since Venus
does not have a planetary magnetic field, it is believed that Venus’s core is likely made of solid metal, or
there is also a chance that the temperature difference between the inner and outer parts of the core are
fairly small, which would prevent a magnetic field from forming.

It’s believed that a global resurfacing event that occurred about 300-500 million years ago might have
something to do with this. The entire surface of Venus was resurfaced, shutting down plate tectonics.
This might have led to a reduced heat flux through the crust, trapping the heat inside the planet.
Without the big heat difference, there’s little heat convection, and so no magnetic field coming from the
core of Venus.

Another reason that Venus may not have a magnetic field is that it spins so slowly. Perhaps the core of
the planet simply doesn’t spin fast enough for a magnetic field to be created.

But this global resurfacing also explains Venus’s broiling surface. This resurfacing would have also
completely erased Venus’s original surface and replaced with through huge volcanic eruptions and
tectonic forces, which would cause the surface to become a dangerous and violent place, just like it is
today.

The high atmospheric pressure, the low wind velocities, and, in particular, the extremely high
temperatures create a surface environment on Venus that is markedly different from any other in the
solar system. As I mentioned before, the surface temperature on Venus is about 900 degrees
Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt lead into soup. The surface of the planet is well illuminated by a yellow-
orange light that filters in through the dense atmosphere.

Venus has many more volcanos than earth does, with most of them being the size of Earth’s largest
volcanic system, the big island of Hawaii, if not even greater. Over 1600 major volcanic features are
known but there are many many more smaller volcanoes present as well, possibly over one million.
Many of these volcanos are currently active, spewing new lava onto Venus’s hot surface. The lava
ejected from these volcanos is thought to be more viscous and silicon rich than that on earth. There are
also many different lava flow features on Venus’s surface, the most notable being the long sinuous
canali. These channels usually have remarkably constant widths, which can be as much as 2 miles. They
commonly extend as far as 300 miles across the surface; with the longest one being 4,200 miles long.

However, most of Venus is covered in smooth plain formations. These plains are made of flat slabs of
layered rock, likely made by the magma that erupted out of some volcano in the past. Such rocks could
also be made by sediment gathering together and compacting, perhaps aided by the high atmospheric
pressure or a few light gusts of wind. Scattered among this rock are loose soil like particles, which if of
an unknown material, as well as pebbled size objects. Soviet experiments and trips to Venus tell us that
the rocks on the planet’s surface seem to have a composition similar to the basalt rocks that are found
on the floors of Earth’s oceans and are also found in some volcanic regions. This does make sense, as
Venus is full of volcanos.

It was also discovered that the highest elevations on the planet exhibit anomalously high radar
reflectivity. This likely means that these peaks are coated with a thin layer of some semiconducting
material. Its composition is unknown, but it could be an iron-containing mineral such as pyrite or
magnetite, which formed at cooler, higher elevations.

Globally, more than 80 percent of the surface deviates less than 0.6 miles from the mean radius. At
several locations on the plains are broad, gently sloping topographic depressions, or lowlands, that may
reach several thousand kilometres across; they include Atalanta Planitia, Guinevere Planitia, and Lavinia
Planitia. As you can probably tell, most features on Venus are named after mythological goddesses,
legendary heroines, famous women from history, and names for Venus itself in different languages.

But there are also two large “continents” that boldly stand out on the surface of this planet. The first,
Ishtar Terra lies to the north, covering an area approximately the size of Australia, while the second, the
Africa-sized Aphrodite Terra lies just south of the equator. Unlike on Earth, these continents weren't
formed by plate tectonics, nor do they sit in a sea of water, since Venus is way too hot for that. Instead,
these continents make up the "rough" patches of Venus, with canyons, trenches, and mountains. So
they aren’t really continents in the way we define them here on Earth, but that’s the best word we have
to describe them.

Ishtar Terra possesses the most spectacular topography on Venus. Much of its interior is a high plateau,
called the Lakshmi Planum, that resembles in configuration the Plateau of Tibet on Earth. The Lakshmi
Planum is bounded by mountains on most sides, with the largest range being the enormous Maxwell
Montes on the east. These mountains soar about 7 miles above the mean radius of Venus, which is
pretty tall for the otherwise flat planet. The topography of the Aphrodite Terra is more complex than
that of Ishtar and is instead characterized by a number of distinct mountain ranges and several deep,
narrow troughs.

Venus also has many different mountain belts, most of which are present in the two different Terrae.
These mountain belts are in some ways very similar to Earth’s Himalayas of Andes. These mountain belts
typically consist of parallel ridges and troughs with spacings of 3–6 miles. They probably developed
when broad bands of the surface of the planet were compressed from the sides and became thickened,
folding and thrusting surface materials upward. Their formation in some respects thus resembles the
building of many mountain ranges on Earth. On the other hand, because of the lack of liquid water or ice
on Venus, their appearance differs in major ways from their counterparts on Earth. Without the flow of
rivers or glaciers to wear them down, Venusian mountain belts have acquired steep slopes as a result of
folding and faulting. In some places the slopes have become so steep that they have collapsed under
their own weight. The erosional forms common in mountainous regions on Earth are absent.

Coronae are huge circular or oval landforms that are typically a few hundred miles in diameter. They are
formed when hot blobs of material deep inside Venus rise to the surface, lifting the surrounding rocks
and fracturing the surface in a distinctive radial pattern. Hundreds of these coronae can be observed on
the surface of Venus, and some are even actively being formed.

Because of it’s thick atmosphere, Venus does not have many impact craters. The few that are present on
the planet are generally around tens of miles in diameter. This is because smaller objects would simply
fragment into tiny pieces due to Venus’s atmosphere. Another curious thing about Venus’s craters is
that the smaller ones are rarely circular in shape. They instead tend of have crazy jagged edges and
funky bends in them, suggesting that the space object that plummeted towards Venus did actually break
into a few pieces on entry but was able to mostly stay together as Venus doesn’t have high winds tat
would blow these pieces away from each other.

The larger craters on Venus are also pretty unique as they have a petal shaped border around them, as if
the ground rose up to hug whatever caused the impact instead of rising and then falling back to the
surface which is what normally happens. This is likely due to the density of the atmospheric gases.
Perhaps the strangest craters on Venus are the youngest, which are partially surrounded by huge
westward facing parabolas composed of some sort of mysterious dark brown matter. Nothing like this
has ever been found anywhere else in the solar system, or even beyond it. No one knows what this
material is, and scientists are nowhere closer to puzzling it out.

But things get even weirder when we start talking about Venus’s atmosphere. The atmosphere is made
up of 96% carbon dioxide and 3.5% molecular oxygen. The atmospheric pressure at the planet’s surface
varies with surface elevation, but at the elevation of the planet’s mean radius it is about 95 times the
atmospheric pressure at Earth’s surface. So, if you somehow found a way to survive Venus’s burning
temperatures, you’d likely be crushed to death. Nice.

Venus’s upper atmosphere extends from the fringes of space down to about 60 miles above the surface.
There the temperature varies considerably, reaching a maximum of about 80–98 ° Fahrenheit in the
daytime, which doesn’t sound too bad. But at night, it drops to −280 to −226° Fahrenheit, which isn’t as
pleasant. In the middle atmosphere the temperature increases smoothly with decreasing altitude, from
about −148 °F, at 60 km above the surface to roughly 14 °F at the top of the continuous cloud deck,
which lies at an altitude of slightly more than 37 miles.

This cloud deck, combined with the greenhouse gas rich atmosphere, keep the planet’s surface
sweltering. Venus actually absorbs less of the sun’s light than earth does due to its high clous cover, but
once this light is absorbed, it heats the surface of the planet and which then reradiates this energy at
infrared wavelengths. On Earth most reradiated infrared radiation escapes back into space, which allows
Earth to maintain a reasonably cool surface temperature. In contrast, on Venus the dense carbon
dioxide atmosphere and the thick cloud layers trap much of the infrared radiation. The trapped radiation
heats the lower atmosphere further, ultimately raising the surface temperature by hundreds of degrees.
This is why it’s very important we keep Earth’s energy balanced and not release greenhouse gasses into
our own atmosphere, or else our own planet will heat up by tens of degrees, causing disastrous effects.

This cloud deck also prevents Venus’s surface from being visible through telescopes, which is why only
recently did scientists learn all about the surface of our hellish neighbor. Winds of about 224 mph keep
the clouds of Venus in constant motion. Though the planet spins slowly, the clouds zip around the top of
the planet's atmosphere every four days. But wind speeds drop closer to the surface, where they only
move a few miles per hour. The nature of the westward flow above the cloud tops can be attributed to
tidal motions induced by solar heating. Nevertheless, the true reason behind this “super rotation” of
Venus’s dense atmosphere is unknown, and it remains one of the more intriguing mysteries in planetary
science. The upper part of the deck is 3 miles thick, after which there is a much denser secondary cloud
deck. Below about 18 miles above the surface of Venus, there are no more clouds present, though there
is a thin haze still present that is slightly thicker near the poles of the planet.

The upper cloud deck has been found to contain substantial amounts of sulfur, which give the clouds
their dark yellow to yellow-orange color. The lower cloud deck has been found to contain large
concentrations of sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide compounds, and droplets of sulfuric acid. The opacity
of these clouds varies rapidly with space and time, which suggests a high level of meteorologic activity.
Radio waves characteristic of lightning have been also been observed. Some of the cloud regions appear
dark when viewed under UV light, for reasons scientists aren’t sure about. It could be that materials that
absorb the UV light are present in small quantities above the cloud tops, such as chlorine.
Though there isn’t heavy wind near the surface of Venus, the great density of Venus’s atmosphere
enables these winds to move loose fine-grained materials producing sand dune like features of “wind
streaks,” which are signs of the downward erosion of topographic features such as mountains. The
directions assumed by the wind-related features suggest that in both hemispheres the surface winds
blow predominantly toward the equator.

This pattern is consistent to a circulation system called Hadley cells, which is believed to be the primary
circulation model on the planet. According to this model, atmospheric gases rise upward as they are
heated by solar energy at the planet’s equator, and then flow at high altitudes toward the poles. When
they arrive at these poles, they sink to the surface as they cool at the higher latitudes, and then flow
toward the equator along the planet’s surface until they warm and rise again, repeating this cycle. This
circulation system is thought to impact the fast speed of Venus’s cloud rotation, but so far all
experiments remain inconclusive so the true reason is as mysterious as ever.

Right above Venus’s atmosphere is something called the ionosphere. As its name implies, the
ionosphere is composed of ions, also known as charged particles, which produced both by absorption of
ultraviolet solar radiation and by the impact of the solar wind. As solar wind bombards the planet, it
forms a bow shock, which is a standing wave of plasma that slows down and heats the planet. For some
planets the bow shock lies at a considerable distance from the surface, held off by the planet’s magnetic
field. But because Venus lacks a magnetic field, its bow shock lies just a few thousand miles above the
surface, held off only by the planet’s ionosphere. This closeness of the bow shock to the surface leads to
particularly intense interactions between the solar wind and Venus’s atmosphere. In fact, the top of the
ionosphere, known as the ionopause, lies at a much lower altitude on the dayside of Venus than on the
nightside owing to the pressure exerted by the solar wind. The density of the ionosphere is also far
greater on the dayside of the planet than on the nightside.

Venus’s interaction with the solar wind results in a gradual, continuous loss to space of hydrogen and
oxygen from the planet’s upper ionosphere. This process is equivalent to a gradual loss of water from
the planet. This means it is possible that a long time ago there was water of the Venusian surface,
though solar winds and a toxic atmosphere now make that impossible.

Due to all these different features, space craft have not been able to survive on Venus for more than a
few hours. NASA scientists have been able to but sattellites in Venus’s orbit but actually landing
something on the surface of the hellish planet is much more challenging since the craft must be able to
survive the pressure and heat for at least an hour or two so it can collect data. The Soviets attempted to
land space craft of Venus in the 1970s, and did have some success, but were unable to then improve
upon those successes. So for now, we depend on the data provided by the many different flyby missions
as well as radar imaging to get a good look of what the planet is like. But perhaps in the future, with
improved technology, we will be able to create spacecraft that can withstand Venus’s hot conditions and
truly explore our neighboring planet.

And on that optimistic note, I’ll be ending today’s post. I hope you all enjoyed learning about Venus and
I’ll see you all next time!