Space and astronomy news
Although they are very different today, Venus, Earth, and Mars were very similar in their youth. All three were warm, with thick, water-rich atmospheres. But over time, Mars became a cold, dry planet with a thin atmosphere, and Venus became superheated, with a crushing, toxic sky. Only Earth became a warm ocean world teeming with life. But why?
Continue reading “Maybe Venus Was Never Habitable”
Venus is often referred to as Earths twin but size and mass are the only similarities. A visitor to one of our nearest neighbours would experience a very different world at the surface. Unlike other planets in the Solar System, Venus seems to show very little active volcanism. The environmental conditions on the surface are harsh so a researcher has suggested a combination of an orbiter, a balloon and a lander would be able to work together to detect seismic activity under the surface.
Think of the Moon and most people will imagine a barren world pockmarked with craters. The same is likely true of Mars albeit more red in colour than grey! The Earth too has had its fair share of craters, some of them large but most of the evidence has been eroded by centuries of weathering. Surprisingly perhaps, Venus, the second planet from the Sun does not have the same weathering processes as we have on Earth yet there are signs of impact craters, but no large impact basins! A team of astronomers now think they have secured a new view on the hottest planet in the Solar System and revealed the missing impact sites.
Continue reading “New View of Venus Reveals Previously Hidden Impact Craters”
Venus is often described as a hellscape. The surface temperature breaches the melting point of lead, and though its atmosphere is dominated by carbon dioxide, it contains enough sulfuric acid to satisfy the comparison with Hades.
But conditions throughout Venus’ ample atmosphere aren’t uniform. There are locations where some of life’s building blocks could resist the planet’s inhospitable nature.
Continue reading “Another Building Block of Life Can Handle Venus’ Sulphuric Acid”
Venus is sometimes called Earth’s sister planet because of their shared physical, geological, and atmospheric features. Scientists have discovered something new about Venus’ geology that’s reminding us of the similarities between the two planets. We have to look deep inside both planets to see what the researchers found.
Continue reading “Scientists Discover New Geological Link Between Earth and Venus”
Venus’s atmosphere has drawn a lot of attention lately. In particular, the consistent discovery of phosphine in its clouds points to potential biological sources. That, in turn, has resulted in numerous suggested missions, including floating a balloon into the atmosphere or having a spacecraft scoop down and suck up atmospheric samples. But a team of engineers led by Jeffrey Balcerski, now an adjunct at Kent State University but then part of the Ohio Aerospace Institute, came up with a different idea years ago – use floating sensor platforms shaped like leaves to collect a wide variety of data throughout Venus’ atmosphere.
Continue reading “Floating LEAVES Could Characterize Venus’s Atmosphere”
Watching meteoroids enter the Earth’s atmosphere and streak across the sky as the visual spectacle known as meteors, it is one of the most awe-inspiring spectacles on Earth, often exhibiting multiple colors as they blaze through the atmosphere, which often reveals their mineral compositions. But what if we could detect and observe meteors streaking through the atmospheres of other planets that possess atmospheres, like Venus, and use this to better determine meteoroid compositions and sizes?
This is what a recently accepted study to Icarus hopes to address as a pair of international researchers investigate how a future Venus orbiter could be used to study meteors streaking through the planet’s thick atmosphere. This study holds the potential to help scientists better understand meteoroids throughout the solar system.
Continue reading “Venus is the Perfect Place to Count Meteors”
It should not be surprising that Venus is dry. It is famous for its hellish conditions, with dense sulphurous clouds, rains of acid, atmospheric pressures comparable to a 900 meter deep lake, and a surface temperature high enough to melt lead. But it’s lack of water is not just a lack of rain and oceans: there’s no ice or water vapour either. Like Earth, Venus is found within our Solar System’s goldilocks zone, so it would have had plenty of water when it was first formed. So where did all of Venus’s water go?
Continue reading “Where Did Venus's Water Go?”
Start talking about Venus and immediately my mind goes to those images from the Venera space probes that visited Venus in the 1970’s. They revealed a world that had been scarred by millennia of volcanic activity yet as far as we could tell those volcanoes were dormant. That is, until just now. Magellan has been mapping the surface of Venus and between 1990 and 1992 had mapped 98% of the surface. Researchers compared two scans of the same area and discovered that there were fresh outflows of molten rock filling a vent crater! There was active volcanism on Venus.
Continue reading “Volcanoes Were Erupting on Venus in the 1990s”
Even though Venus and Earth are so-called sister planets, they’re as different as heaven and hell. Earth is a natural paradise where life has persevered under its azure skies despite multiple mass extinctions. On the other hand, Venus is a blistering planet with clouds of sulphuric acid and atmospheric pressure strong enough to squash a human being.
But the sister thing won’t go away because both worlds are about the same mass and radius and are rocky planets next to one another in the inner Solar System. Why are they so different? What do the differences tell us about our search for life?
Continue reading “What Deadly Venus Can Tell Us About Life on Other Worlds”