Venus is the second planet from the Sun and our closest planetary neighbor. It is a world very similar to Earth, at least in structure and size. Venus rotates slowly in the opposite direction to most planets and is named after the ancient Roman goddess of love and beauty, known as Aphrodite to the ancient Greeks.
From an average distance of 108 million kilometers, Venus is 0.7 astronomical units from the Sun, so it takes 6 minutes for sunlight to travel from the Sun to Venus (on Earth it is 8 minutes and 19 seconds).
It is a little smaller than Earth; It has a radius of 6,052 kilometers and its thick atmosphere traps heat in a colossal greenhouse effect with surface temperatures high enough to melt even lead. Despite not being the closest planet to our star, it is the hottest in our solar system. Between intense 480 degree Celsius heat, corrosive sulfuric clouds, and a crushing atmosphere that is 90 times denser than Earth’s, landing a spacecraft there is incredibly challenging. Of the nine Soviet probes that accomplished the feat, none lasted more than 127 minutes.
The planet is a mantle made of hot rock that slowly shakes due to its internal heat. The surface is a thin crust of rock that bulges and moves as the mantle moves and creates volcanoes.
Overheated by greenhouse gases, Venus’s climate was once somewhat more like Earth’s, with water worth a shallow ocean. It may even have subduction zones like Earth, areas where the planet’s crust sinks into rock closer to the planet’s core.
Scientists believe that it started its life with the same composition, the same amount of water and carbon dioxide as our planet. And … they went down two completely different paths.
Today we are here to tell you a few curiosities about this planet that perhaps you did not know.
