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A new Climate Model Suggests That Venus Never had Oceans

Thanks to evidence provided by missions like NASA’s Magellan spacecraft, scientists have theorized that Venus likely experienced a catastrophic resurfacing event about 500 million years ago (give or take 200 Mya). This is believed to be the reason why Venus is such a hellish place today, with an atmosphere that is 92 times as dense as Earth’s, predominantly composed of carbon dioxide (CO2), and temperatures hot enough to melt lead.

The question of what Venus was like before this event took place – particularly, whether or not it had oceans – has been the subject of debate ever since. While many believe that Venus’s surface was covered in large bodies of water, a recent study has contradicted this claim. Using a state-of-the-art climate model, a team of French researchers has developed an alternative scenario of how Venus evolved to become what it is today.

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There’s Enough Sunlight Getting Through Venus’ Clouds to Support High-Altitude Life

Carl Sagan once famously, and sarcastically, observed that, since we couldn’t see what was going on on the surface of Venus, there must be dinosaurs living there.  Once humans started landing probes on the planet’s surface, any illusion of a lush tropical world was quickly dispelled.  Venus was a hellscape of extraordinary temperatures and pressures that would make it utterly inhospitable to anything resembling Earth life.  

But more recently, astrobiologists have again turned their attention to the Morning Star.  But this time, instead of looking at the surface, they looked in the clouds.  And now, a new study from researchers at California Polytechnic, Pomona, has calculated that there is likely a layer in the atmosphere where photosynthesis can occur. Meaning there is a zone in Venus’ cloud layer where life could have evolved.

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The Early Solar System was Messier and More Violent Than Previously Believed

Our conventional models of planet formation may have to be updated, according to a pair of new papers.

Accretion is the keyword in current planet formation theory. The idea is that the planets formed out of the solar nebula, the material left over after the Sun formed. They did this through accretion, where small particles accumulate into more massive objects. These massive boulder-sized objects, called planetesimals, continued to merge together into larger entities, sometimes through collisions. Eventually, through repeated mergers and collisions, the inner Solar System was populated by four rocky planets.

But the new research suggests that the collisions played out much differently than thought and that objects collided with each other several times, in a series of hit and runs, before merging. This research fills some stubborn holes in our current understanding.

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Two Spacecraft are Flying Past Venus, Just 33 Hours Apart

When Longfellow wrote about “ships passing in the night” back in 1863, he probably wasn’t thinking about satellites passing near Venus.  He probably also wouldn’t have considered 575,000 km separation as “passing”, but on the scale of interplanetary exploration, it might as well be.  And passing is exactly what two satellites will be doing near Venus in the next few days – performing two flybys of the planet within 33 hours of each other.

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Observing the Night Side of Venus is Actually Pretty Tricky

Observing the dark side of planets is hard. In the visible spectrum, they are almost unobservable, while in the infrared some heat signatures may come through, but not enough to help see what is going on in a planet’s atmosphere.  Now a team from the University of Tokyo think they’ve developed a way to monitor weather patterns on the night side of one of the most difficult planets of all – Venus.

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Volcanic Activity on Venus Could Explain Phosphine

Ever since the announcement last September that astronomers found evidence of phosphine in the clouds of Venus, the planet has been getting a lot of attention. It’s not surprising. Phosphine is a potential biosignature: On Earth, it is produced by microbial life. Might a similar biological process be taking place in the skies of our sister planet? It’s a tantalizing prospect, and is definitely worth examining closely, but it’s too early to be sure. Microbes aren’t the only way to get phosphine. A new paper published on July 12th in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science suggests that volcanism might instead be to blame for the strange chemistry in the Venusian cloud tops.

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Venus’ Surface Tectonics is More Like Pack ice on Earth

Planets move in mysterious ways.  Or at least their surfaces do.  Earth famously has a system of tectonic plates that drives the movement of its crust.  Those plate tectonics are ultimately driven by the flow of material in the mantle – the layer directly below the crust.  Now, scientists have found a slightly different deformation mechanic on our nearest sister planet – Venus.

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Bad News, Life Probably can’t Exist on Venus. Good News, it Could be in Jupiter’s Clouds

For decades, scientists engaged in the search for life in the Universe (aka. astrobiology) have focused on searching for life on other Earth-like planets. These included terrestrial (aka. rocky) planets beyond our Solar System (extrasolar planets) and ones here at home. Beyond Earth, Mars is considered to be the most habitable planet next to Earth, and scientists have also theorized that life could exist (in microbial form) in the cloud tops of Venus.

In all cases, a major focal point is whether or not planets have large bodies of water on their surfaces (or did in the past). However, a new study led by a research team from the UK and German (with support from NASA) has shown that the existence of life may have less to do with the quantity of water and more to with the presence of atmospheric water molecules. As a result, we may have better luck finding life on Jupiter’s turbulent cloud deck than Venus’.

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