Planetary Facts All of the relevant information about Venus collected on one page, including details about size, orbit Myth and Culture There are several interesting myths associated with the planet Venus. While Venus was the goddess Missions to Venus A table containing information about the spacecraft that have visited Venus Images and Multimedia Access wonderful captioned photos and illustrations that will inspire and excite you. Venus Links These are links to other great web sites about Venus. More about Venus Global locations of visitors using this page right now.
Please log in Username: Science Blogs Real Climate: NESTA welcomes new Institutional Affiliates in support of our ongoing programs, as well as collaborations on new projects. Although Venus is not the planet closest to the sun, its dense atmosphere traps heat in a runaway version of the greenhouse effect that warms Earth.
As a result, temperatures on Venus reach degrees Fahrenheit degrees Celsius , more than hot enough to melt lead. Probes that scientists have landed there have survived only a few hours before being destroyed. Venus has a hellish atmosphere as well, consisting mainly of carbon dioxide with clouds of sulfuric acid, and scientists have only detected trace amounts of water in the atmosphere. The atmosphere is heavier than that of any other planet, leading to a surface pressure 90 times that of Earth. The surface of Venus is extremely dry. During its evolution, ultraviolet rays from the sun evaporated water quickly, keeping it in a prolonged molten state.
There is no liquid water on its surface today because the scorching heat created by its ozone-filled atmosphere would cause any to boil away. Roughly two-thirds of the Venusian surface is covered by flat, smooth plains that are marred by thousands of volcanoes, some which are still active today , ranging from about 0. Six mountainous regions make up about one-third of the Venusian surface.
One mountain range, called Maxwell, is about miles km long and reaches up to some 7 miles Venus also possesses a number of surface features unlike anything on Earth. For example, Venus has coronae, or crowns — ring-like structures that range from roughly 95 to miles to km wide. Scientists believe these formed when hot material beneath the crust rises up, warping the planet's surface.
Venus also has tesserae, or tiles — raised areas in which many ridges and valleys have formed in different directions. With conditions on Venus that could be described as infernal, the ancient name for Venus — Lucifer — seems to fit. However, this name did not carry any fiendish connotations; Lucifer means "light-bringer," and when seen from Earth, Venus is brighter than any other planet or even any star in the night sky because of its highly reflective clouds and its closeness to our planet.
Venus takes Earth-days to rotate on its axis, by far the slowest of any of the major planets, and because of this sluggish spin, its metal core cannot generate a magnetic field similar to Earth's. If viewed from above, Venus rotates on its axis the opposite way that most planets rotate. That means on Venus, the sun would appear to rise in the west and set in the east.
On Earth, the sun appears to rise in the east and set in the west. The Venusian year — the time it takes to orbit the sun — is about Earth-days long. Normally, that would mean that days on Venus would be longer than years. However, because of Venus' curious retrograde rotation, the time from one sunrise to the next is only about Earth-days long. Transit of Venus from June 5, , when the planet transited in front of the sun for the last time until the year According to these measurements, the lightning rate is at least half of that on Earth.
Venus Express also discovered, in , that an ozone layer exists high in the atmosphere of Venus. In December and to a lesser extent in April and May , researchers working on Japan's Akatsuki mission observed bow shapes in the atmosphere of Venus.
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This was considered direct evidence of the existence of perhaps the largest stationary gravity waves in the solar system. In , Venera 4 found Venus's magnetic field to be much weaker than that of Earth. This magnetic field is induced by an interaction between the ionosphere and the solar wind , [87] [88] rather than by an internal dynamo as in the Earth's core. Venus's small induced magnetosphere provides negligible protection to the atmosphere against cosmic radiation. The lack of an intrinsic magnetic field at Venus was surprising, given that it is similar to Earth in size, and was expected also to contain a dynamo at its core.
A dynamo requires three things: The core is thought to be electrically conductive and, although its rotation is often thought to be too slow, simulations show it is adequate to produce a dynamo. On Earth, convection occurs in the liquid outer layer of the core because the bottom of the liquid layer is much hotter than the top.
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On Venus, a global resurfacing event may have shut down plate tectonics and led to a reduced heat flux through the crust. This caused the mantle temperature to increase, thereby reducing the heat flux out of the core. As a result, no internal geodynamo is available to drive a magnetic field. Instead, the heat from the core is being used to reheat the crust. One possibility is that Venus has no solid inner core, [92] or that its core is not cooling, so that the entire liquid part of the core is at approximately the same temperature.
Another possibility is that its core has already completely solidified. The state of the core is highly dependent on the concentration of sulfur , which is unknown at present.
Explore Venus
The weak magnetosphere around Venus means that the solar wind is interacting directly with its outer atmosphere. Here, ions of hydrogen and oxygen are being created by the dissociation of neutral molecules from ultraviolet radiation. The solar wind then supplies energy that gives some of these ions sufficient velocity to escape Venus's gravity field.
This erosion process results in a steady loss of low-mass hydrogen, helium, and oxygen ions, whereas higher-mass molecules, such as carbon dioxide, are more likely to be retained. Atmospheric erosion by the solar wind probably led to the loss of most of Venus's water during the first billion years after it formed. Venus orbits the Sun at an average distance of about 0. Although all planetary orbits are elliptical , Venus's orbit is the closest to circular , with an eccentricity of less than 0. All the planets in the Solar System orbit the Sun in a counterclockwise direction as viewed from above Earth's north pole.
Because its rotation is so slow, Venus is very close to spherical. Venus's equator rotates at 6. Venus may have formed from the solar nebula with a different rotation period and obliquity, reaching its current state because of chaotic spin changes caused by planetary perturbations and tidal effects on its dense atmosphere, a change that would have occurred over the course of billions of years. The rotation period of Venus may represent an equilibrium state between tidal locking to the Sun's gravitation, which tends to slow rotation, and an atmospheric tide created by solar heating of the thick Venusian atmosphere.
Venus has no natural satellites. Alex Alemi's and David Stevenson 's study of models of the early Solar System at the California Institute of Technology shows Venus likely had at least one moon created by a huge impact event billions of years ago. An alternative explanation for the lack of satellites is the effect of strong solar tides, which can destabilize large satellites orbiting the inner terrestrial planets.
To the naked eye , Venus appears as a white point of light brighter than any other planet or star apart from the Sun. Venus "overtakes" Earth every days as it orbits the Sun. Its greater maximum elongation means it is visible in dark skies long after sunset. As the brightest point-like object in the sky, Venus is a commonly misreported " unidentified flying object ". As it orbits the Sun, Venus displays phases like those of the Moon in a telescopic view. The planet appears as a small and "full" disc when it is on the opposite side of the Sun at superior conjunction.
Venus shows a larger disc and "quarter phase" at its maximum elongations from the Sun, and appears its brightest in the night sky. The planet presents a much larger thin "crescent" in telescopic views as it passes along the near side between Earth and the Sun. Venus displays its largest size and "new phase" when it is between Earth and the Sun at inferior conjunction.
Its atmosphere is visible through telescopes by the halo of sunlight refracted around it. The Venusian orbit is slightly inclined relative to Earth's orbit; thus, when the planet passes between Earth and the Sun, it usually does not cross the face of the Sun. Transits of Venus occur when the planet's inferior conjunction coincides with its presence in the plane of Earth's orbit. The latest pair was June 8, and June 5—6, The transit could be watched live from many online outlets or observed locally with the right equipment and conditions. The preceding pair of transits occurred in December and December ; the following pair will occur in December and December Historically, transits of Venus were important, because they allowed astronomers to determine the size of the astronomical unit , and hence the size of the Solar System as shown by Horrocks in The pentagram of Venus is the path that Venus makes as observed from Earth.
Successive inferior conjunctions of Venus repeat very near a Naked eye observations of Venus during daylight hours exist in several anecdotes and records. Astronomer Edmund Halley calculated its maximum naked eye brightness in , when many Londoners were alarmed by its appearance in the daytime. French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte once witnessed a daytime apparition of the planet while at a reception in Luxembourg.
A long-standing mystery of Venus observations is the so-called ashen light —an apparent weak illumination of its dark side, seen when the planet is in the crescent phase. The first claimed observation of ashen light was made in , but the existence of the illumination has never been reliably confirmed. Observers have speculated it may result from electrical activity in the Venusian atmosphere, but it could be illusory, resulting from the physiological effect of observing a bright, crescent-shaped object.
Though some ancient civilizations referred to Venus both as the "morning star" and as the "evening star", names that reflect the assumption that these were two separate objects, the earliest recorded observations of Venus by the ancient Sumerians show that they recognized Venus as a single object, [] associated it with the goddess Inanna.
The ancient Greeks also initially believed Venus to be two separate stars: Phosphorus , the morning star, and Hesperus , the evening star. Pliny the Elder credited the realization that they were a single object to Pythagoras in the sixth century BCE, [] while Diogenes Laertius argued that Parmenides was probably responsible for this rediscovery. In the second century, in his astronomical treatise Almagest , Ptolemy theorized that both Mercury and Venus are located between the Sun and the Earth. The 11th century Persian astronomer Avicenna claimed to have observed the transit of Venus , [] which later astronomers took as confirmation of Ptolemy's theory.
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When Venus is furthest from the Sun in the sky, it shows a half-lit phase , and when it is closest to the Sun in the sky, it shows as a crescent or full phase. This could be possible only if Venus orbited the Sun, and this was among the first observations to clearly contradict the Ptolemaic geocentric model that the Solar System was concentric and centred on Earth. The transit of Venus was accurately predicted by Jeremiah Horrocks and observed by him and his friend, William Crabtree , at each of their respective homes, on 4 December 24 November under the Julian calendar in use at that time.
The atmosphere of Venus was discovered in by Russian polymath Mikhail Lomonosov. He correctly surmised this was due to scattering of sunlight in a dense atmosphere. Later, American astronomer Chester Smith Lyman observed a complete ring around the dark side of the planet when it was at inferior conjunction , providing further evidence for an atmosphere. Its almost featureless disc gave no hint what its surface might be like, and it was only with the development of spectroscopic , radar and ultraviolet observations that more of its secrets were revealed.
The first ultraviolet observations were carried out in the s, when Frank E. Ross found that ultraviolet photographs revealed considerable detail that was absent in visible and infrared radiation. He suggested this was due to a dense, yellow lower atmosphere with high cirrus clouds above it. Spectroscopic observations in the s gave the first clues about the Venusian rotation.
Vesto Slipher tried to measure the Doppler shift of light from Venus, but found he could not detect any rotation. He surmised the planet must have a much longer rotation period than had previously been thought. Radar observations of Venus were first carried out in the s, and provided the first measurements of the rotation period, which were close to the modern value.
Radar observations in the s revealed details of the Venusian surface for the first time. The observations also revealed a bright region attributed to mountains, which was called Maxwell Montes. The first robotic space probe mission to Venus, and the first to any planet, began with the Soviet Venera program in On 18 October , the Soviet Venera 4 successfully entered the atmosphere and deployed science experiments.
In , Mariner 10 swung by Venus on its way to Mercury and took ultraviolet photographs of the clouds, revealing the extraordinarily high wind speeds in the Venusian atmosphere.
Observing Venus
In , the Soviet Venera 9 and 10 landers transmitted the first images from the surface of Venus, which were in black and white. In the first colour images of the surface were obtained with the Soviet Venera 13 and 14 landers. NASA obtained additional data in with the Pioneer Venus project that consisted of two separate missions: Equipped with seven scientific instruments, Venus Express provided unprecedented long-term observation of Venus's atmosphere.
ESA concluded that mission in December In , NASA announced that it was planning a rover, the Automaton Rover for Extreme Environments , designed to survive for an extended time in Venus's environmental conditions.
Planet Venus Facts: A Hot, Hellish & Volcanic Planet
It would be controlled by a mechanical computer and driven by wind power. Venus is a primary feature of the night sky, and so has been of remarkable importance in mythology , astrology and fiction throughout history and in different cultures. Classical poets such as Homer , Sappho , Ovid and Virgil spoke of the star and its light. Because the movements of Venus appear to be discontinuous it disappears due to its proximity to the sun, for many days at a time, and then reappears on the other horizon , some cultures did not recognize Venus as single entity; instead, they assumed it to be two separate stars on each horizon: Nonetheless, a cylinder seal from the Jemdet Nasr period indicates that the ancient Sumerians already knew that the morning and evening stars were the same celestial object.
The Sumerians associated the planet with the goddess Inanna known as Ishtar by the later Akkadians and Babylonians , and their myths of Inanna are often allegories for the apparent motions and cycles of the planet. Shukra which is used in Indian Vedic astrology [] means "clear, pure" or "brightness, clearness" in Sanskrit. One of the nine Navagraha , it is held to affect wealth, pleasure and reproduction; it was the son of Bhrgu , preceptor of the Daityas, and guru of the Asuras. Venus is known as Kejora in Indonesian and Malay.
The Ancient Egyptians and Greeks believed Venus to be two separate bodies, a morning star and an evening star. The Egyptians knew the morning star as Tioumoutiri and the evening star as Ouaiti. Venus was considered the most important celestial body observed by the Maya , who called it Chac ek , [] or Noh Ek ', "the Great Star". With the invention of the telescope, the idea that Venus was a physical world and possible destination began to take form. The impenetrable Venusian cloud cover gave science fiction writers free rein to speculate on conditions at its surface; all the more so when early observations showed that not only was it similar in size to Earth, it possessed a substantial atmosphere.
Closer to the Sun than Earth, the planet was frequently depicted as warmer, but still habitable by humans. Findings from the first missions to Venus showed the reality to be quite different, and brought this particular genre to an end. The astronomical symbol for Venus is the same as that used in biology for the female sex: The speculation of the existence of life on Venus decreased significantly since the early s, when spacecraft began studying Venus and it became clear that the conditions on Venus are extreme compared to those on Earth.
A few scientists have speculated that thermoacidophilic extremophile microorganisms might exist in the lower-temperature, acidic upper layers of the Venusian atmosphere. This has led to proposals to use aerostats lighter-than-air balloons for initial exploration and ultimately for permanent "floating cities" in the Venusian atmosphere. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article is about the planet. For other uses, see Venus disambiguation. Second planet from the Sun in the Solar System. A real-colour image taken by Mariner 10 processed from two filters.
The surface is obscured by thick sulfuric acid clouds. Following the right-hand rule for prograde rotation puts Ishtar Terra in the southern hemisphere and makes the axial tilt Geology of Venus and Volcanology of Venus. Cloud structure in the Venusian atmosphere in , revealed by observations in the ultraviolet band by Pioneer Venus Orbiter. Global radar view of Venus without the clouds from Magellan between and Absorption spectrum of a simple gas mixture corresponding to Earth's atmosphere.
Green colour — water vapour, red — carbon dioxide, WN — wavenumber other colours have different meanings, lower wavelengths on the right, higher on the left.