Venus, the second planet from the sun, is the hottest and brightest planet in the solar system.

The scorching planet is named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty and is the only solar system planet named after a female when following the International Astronomical Union designation of names that the astronomy community uses as a convention. (Other cultures have different names for celestial locations.)

Venus may have been named after the most beautiful deity of the Roman (and Greek) pantheons because it shone the brightest among the five planets known to ancient astronomers. In ancient Greek city-states, however, Venus was called Aphrodite.

In ancient times, Venus was often thought to be two different stars, the evening star and the morning star — that is, the ones that first appeared at sunset and sunrise. In Christian Latin, they were respectively known as Vesper and Lucifer. (In Christian times, Lucifer, or "light-bringer," became known as the name of Satan before his fall.)

However, further observations of Venus in the space age show a very hellish environment. This makes Venus a very difficult planet to observe from up close because spacecraft do not survive long on its surface.

The "real" color of Venus, however, is impossible to see from orbit due to the sulfuric acid clouds surrounding the planet. Pictures of Venus are thus only visible if an orbiting satellite has the ability to peer through the thick clouds. For a human explorer to see the surface, they would need to descend and to survive the oven-like temperatures and high pressures present down there. That harsh environment likely means that for now, we'll be using robotic explorers to look at Venus for us.

Venus facts

Venus and Earth are often called twins because they are similar in size, mass, density, composition and gravity. Venus is only a little bit smaller than our home planet, with a mass of about 80% of Earth's.

Venus is not a gas planet, but a rocky planet. The interior of Venus is made of a metallic iron core that's roughly 2,400 miles (6,000 km) wide. Venus' molten rocky mantle is roughly 1,200 miles (3,000 km) thick. Venus' crust is mostly basalt and is estimated to be 6 to 12 miles (10 to 20 km) thick, on average.

Why Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system is rather complicated. Although Venus is not the planet closest to the sun, its dense atmosphere traps heat in a runaway version of the greenhouse effect that we see firsthand on Earth with global warming. As a result, temperatures on Venus reach 880 degrees Fahrenheit (471 degrees Celsius), which is more than hot enough to melt lead. Spacecraft have survived only a few hours after landing on the planet before being destroyed.

Venus' surface is extremely dry. During the planet's evolution, ultraviolet rays from the sun evaporated water quickly, keeping Venus 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 water to immediately boil away.

Venus Climate

The very top layer of Venus' clouds zips around the planet every four Earth days, propelled by hurricane-force winds traveling roughly 224 mph (360 kph). This superrotation of the planet's atmosphere, some 60 times faster than Venus itself rotates, might be one of Venus' biggest mysteries.

The clouds also carry signs of meteorological events known as gravity waves, caused when winds blow over geological features, causing rises and falls in the layers of air. The winds at the planet's surface are much slower, estimated to be just a few miles per hour.

Unusual stripes in the upper clouds of Venus are dubbed "blue absorbers" or "ultraviolet absorbers" because they strongly absorb light in the blue and ultraviolet wavelengths. These are soaking up a huge amount of energy — nearly half of the total solar energy the planet absorbs. As such, they seem to play a major role in keeping Venus as hellish as it is. Their exact composition remains uncertain; Some scientists suggest it could even be life, although many things would need to be ruled out before that conclusion is accepted.

Venus Exploration

The Soviet Union's Venera 7 was the first spacecraft to land on another planet, having landed on Venus in December 1970. Venera 9 returned the first photographs of the Venusian surface. The first Venusian orbiter, NASA's Magellan, generated maps of 98% of the planet's surface, showing features as small as 330 feet (100 meters) across.

The European Space Agency's Venus Express spent eight years in orbit around Venus with a large variety of instruments and confirmed the presence of lightning there. In August 2014, as the satellite began wrapping up its mission, controllers engaged in a month-long maneuver that plunged the spacecraft into the outer layers of the planet's atmosphere.

As of at least late 2019, NASA and the Russian Academy of Sciences' Space Research Institute have discussed collaborating on the Venera-D mission, which would include an orbiter, a lander and perhaps a solar-powered airship. (100% not happening anymore)

Life on Venus

A breakthrough scientific discovery in 2020 suddenly had scientists discussing whether or not it was possible that life could somehow exist in the present-day hellish atmospheres of Venus.

Now, scientists think that it is most likely that, billions of years ago, Venus could have been habitable and fairly similar to current-day Earth. But since then, it has undergone a drastic greenhouse effect that has resulted in Venus' current iteration with scorching surface temperatures and an atmosphere that many describe as "hellish."

However, in 2020, scientists revealed the discovery of a strange chemical in the planet's clouds that some think could be a sign of life: phosphine.

Well, while phosphine exists in strange ways such as rat poison, it has also been spotted alongside groups of certain microorganisms and some scientists think that, on Earth, the compound is produced by microbes as they decay chemically.

This has caused some to suspect that, if microbes could create phosphine, then perhaps microbes might be responsible for the phosphine in Venus' atmosphere. Since the discovery, there have been follow-up analyses that have made some doubt whether or not the compound is created by microbes, but scientists are continuing to investigate, especially with new missions planned for the planet.

Terraforming Venus

Terraforming any planet is sure to bring up ethical questions about how to protect any life that might be there, along with how to preserve any information that life left behind.

Assuming we do want to go ahead with terraforming Venus, working on this would require an ocean and some sort of weathering process, a proposal from 2020 suggests. With enough water (assuming we could access tremendous amounts of the stuff) it might be possible to remove dust from the air and to get the atmospheric carbon dioxide to condense onto the surface. One possible way of making this happen could be to throw immense numbers of icy objects, like comets, into the atmosphere of Venus; how to get that to happen is another question, of course.

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