{"id":2284,"date":"2026-09-08T04:17:18","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T01:17:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/eng\/?p=2284"},"modified":"2026-09-08T04:19:42","modified_gmt":"2026-09-08T01:19:42","slug":"the-latest-facts-about-our-planetary-neighbor-venus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planeta21vek.ru\/eng\/2026\/09\/08\/the-latest-facts-about-our-planetary-neighbor-venus\/","title":{"rendered":"The latest facts about our planetary neighbor, Venus"},"content":{"rendered":"

Venus is the second planet from the Sun and Earth’s closest planetary neighbor. Venus is the third-brightest object in the sky after the Sun and the Moon. Venus rotates slowly, in the opposite direction to most planets. Several Russian Venera probes have detected particles about a micron in length in the lower layers of Venus’s atmosphere\u2014roughly the same size as a bacterium on Earth.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Venus is similar in structure and size to Earth, and is sometimes called Earth’s evil twin. Its thick atmosphere traps heat through a runaway greenhouse effect, making it the hottest planet in our solar system, with a surface temperature high enough to melt lead\u2014about 872 degrees Fahrenheit (467 degrees Celsius). And the atmospheric pressure at the surface is approximately 93 times higher than at sea level on Earth. Beneath Venus’s dense, permanent clouds lie volcanoes and deformed mountains. Information provided by NASA’s press service.<\/span><\/p>\n

The ancient Romans could easily see seven bright objects in the sky: the Sun, the Moon, and the five brightest planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. They named these objects after their most important gods. Venus is named after the ancient Roman goddess of love and beauty, known to the ancient Greeks as Aphrodite. Most of the objects on Venus are named after women. It is the only planet named after a female goddess.<\/span><\/p>\n

Venus orbits the Sun at an average distance of 67 million miles (108 million kilometers), or 0.72 astronomical units (1 astronomical unit, abbreviated AU, is the distance from the Sun to Earth). It takes sunlight about six minutes to travel from the Sun to Venus, compared to about eight minutes from the Sun to Earth.<\/span><\/p>\n

Earth’s proximity to Venus is a matter of perspective. The planet is almost the same diameter as Earth. Its diameter at the equator is about 7,521 miles (12,104 kilometers), while Earth’s is 7,926 miles (12,756 kilometers). From Earth, Venus is the brightest object in the night sky after our Moon. Therefore, the ancients attached great importance to it in their cultures, even considering it two objects: the morning star and the evening star. This is where the optical illusion comes in.<\/span><\/p>\n

Because Venus’s orbit is closer to the Sun than ours, they\u2014from our perspective\u2014never move very far apart. The ancient Egyptians and Greeks saw Venus in two forms: first in one orbital position (morning), then in another (your “evening” Venus), simply at different times of the year.<\/span><\/p>\n

At its closest point to Earth, Venus is about 24 million miles (approximately 38 million kilometers) away. However, most of the time, the two planets are farther apart. The maximum distance between Venus and Earth is about 162 million miles (261 million kilometers). Mercury, the innermost planet, actually spends more time near Earth than Venus.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

Venus has phases, just like our Moon\u2014full moon, crescent moon, quarter moon, and so on. However, a complete cycle, from new moon to full moon, takes 584 days, while our Moon takes only a month. It was this perspective, first observed by Galileo through a telescope, that provided key scientific evidence for the Copernican heliocentric model of the solar system.<\/span><\/p>\n

Spending a day on Venus would be a rather disorienting experience\u2014assuming, of course, your spacecraft or spacesuit could protect you from the extreme heat and crushing air pressure. First, your “day” would last 243 Earth days\u2014even longer than a Venusian year (one orbit around the Sun), which is only 225 Earth days. Second, due to the planet’s extremely slow rotation, it would take 117 Earth days from sunrise to sunset. And, incidentally, the Sun would rise in the west and set in the east, because Venus rotates backwards compared to Earth.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\nIn February 1974, as NASA’s Mariner 10 spacecraft was moving away from Venus, it captured this seemingly peaceful view of Venus. But despite its serene appearance, Venus is a world of unbearable heat, crushing atmospheric pressure, and clouds of corrosive acid. NASA\/JPL-Caltech<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

On Earth, where the axis of rotation is tilted by approximately 23 degrees, summer occurs when our part of the planet (our hemisphere) receives the sun’s rays more directly\u2014a result of this tilt. In winter, the tilt means the rays become less directly directed. Venus doesn’t have this position: its very slight tilt of just three degrees is too small to cause noticeable seasons.<\/span><\/p>\n

Venus is the hottest planet in our solar system, with a surface temperature of about 872 degrees Fahrenheit (467 degrees Celsius). And the atmospheric pressure at the surface is the same as that found more than 3,000 feet underwater on Earth (930 meters). The Soviet Union sent a series of probes to Venus between 1961 and 1984 as part of its Venera program (Venera is the Russian name for Venus). Ten probes reached the surface, and some of them operated briefly after landing. The longest-lasting probe lasted two hours, the shortest 23 minutes. Photographs taken before the landers overheated show a barren, dull, and rocky landscape and a sky likely a sulfur-yellow hue.<\/span><\/p>\n

Volcanic activity and tectonic forces likely erased most traces of Venus’s early surface. Newer computer models suggest that surface renewal may have occurred gradually over a long period of time. The average age of surface features may be as little as 150 million years, although older sections are also present.<\/span><\/p>\n

Venus is dotted with valleys and high mountains, dotted with thousands of volcanoes. Among its surface features\u2014most of which are named after real and mythical women\u2014are Ishtar Terra, a rocky highland region roughly the size of Australia located near the North Pole, and an even larger region, roughly the size of South America, called Aphrodite Terra, stretching across the equator. One mountain reaches a height of 36,000 feet (11 kilometers), higher than Mount Everest. Remarkably, other than Earth, Venus has the fewest impact craters of any rocky planet.<\/span><\/p>\n

Other notable features of the Venusian landscape include:<\/span>
\n– A volcanic crater named Sacajawea after the Native American guide Lewis and Clark.<\/span>
\n– A deep canyon named Diana after the Roman goddess of the hunt.<\/span>
\n– Pancake-shaped domes with flat tops and steep sides, up to 38 miles (62 kilometers) wide, thought to be formed by the eruption of highly viscous lava.<\/span>
\n– “Tick domes” – bizarre volcanoes with radiating spurs that, from above, resemble their bloodsucking namesakes.<\/span>
\n– Tesserae – areas with intricate patterns of ridges and furrows that suggest that, due to the scorching heat, the rocks on Venus behave somewhat like peanut butter under a thin, dense layer of chocolate.<\/span><\/p>\n

The atmosphere of Venus is a combination of extremes. Venus, with the hottest surface in the solar system except for the sun itself, is even hotter than the innermost planet, charred Mercury. The atmosphere consists primarily of carbon dioxide\u2014the same gas that causes the greenhouse effect on both Venus and Earth\u2014with dense clouds of sulfuric acid. Atmospheric pressure at the surface is 93 times greater than at sea level on Earth. At the surface, the hot, high-pressure carbon dioxide is corrosive. But higher in the atmosphere, the temperature and pressure begin to decrease.<\/span><\/p>\n

If we could cut Venus and Earth in half, pole to pole, and place them side by side, they would look strikingly similar. Each planet has an iron core surrounded by a hot rocky mantle; a thin layer forms the rocky outer crust. On both planets, this thin layer changes shape and sometimes erupts volcanically in response to fluctuating temperatures and pressures deep underground.<\/span><\/p>\n

On Earth, the slow movement of continents over thousands and millions of years reshapes the surface\u2014a process known as plate tectonics. Something similar may have occurred on Venus early in its history. Today, a key element of this process may be subduction, or the sliding of one continental “plate” beneath another, which can also trigger volcanic eruptions. Subduction is believed to be the first step in the formation of plate tectonics.<\/span><\/p>\n

NASA’s Magellan spacecraft, which completed a five-year mission to Venus in 1994, used radar to map the scorching surface. Magellan saw a landmass with extreme volcanic activity\u2014a relatively young surface that had recently undergone geological change\u2014and ranges of high mountains.<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite being similar in size to Earth and having a similarly sized iron core, Venus does not have its own internally generated magnetic field. Instead, Venus has what’s called an induced magnetic field. This weak magnetic field is created by the interaction of the Sun’s magnetic field and the planet’s outer atmosphere. Ultraviolet light from the Sun excites gases in Venus’s outer atmosphere; these electrically excited gases are called ions, and so this region is called the ionosphere (Earth also has an ionosphere). The solar wind\u2014a vortex of electrically charged particles traveling at a million miles per hour, continuously emanating from the Sun\u2014carries the Sun’s magnetic field with it. When the Sun’s magnetic field interacts with Venus’s electrically excited ionosphere, it creates, or induces, a magnetic field there. This induced magnetic field envelops the planet and takes the shape of an elongated teardrop or comet tail as the solar wind blows past Venus and out into the Solar System.<\/span><\/p>\n

Venus is one of two planets in our solar system without a satellite, but it does have a quasi-satellite, officially named Zoozve. This object was discovered on November 11, 2002, by Brian Skiff as part of the NASA-funded LONEOS (Lowell Observatory Near-Earth-Object Search) project in Flagstaff, Arizona, which concluded in February 2008.<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Quasi-satellites, sometimes called quasi-moons, are asteroids that orbit the Sun while remaining close to the planet. A quasi-satellite’s orbit is typically more elliptical and less stable than the planet’s orbit. Over time, the shape of a quasi-satellite’s orbit can change, and it can move away from the planet.<\/span><\/p>\n

According to the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the organization that names space objects, Zoozve is the first identified quasi-satellite of a major planet. Earth also has quasi-satellites, including a small asteroid discovered in 2016.<\/span><\/p>\n

Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) estimate that Zoozve ranges in size from 660 feet (200 meters) to 1,640 feet (500 meters) across.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

Interestingly, Zoozwe also orbits relatively close to Earth, but poses no threat to our planet. Over the next 175 years, Zoozwe will make its closest approach to Earth in 2149, when it will be about 2.2 million miles (3.5 million kilometers), or approximately nine times the distance from Earth to the Moon.<\/span><\/p>\n

After his discovery in 2002, Skiff reported his find to the Minor Planet Center, which is funded by a Near-Earth Object Observations (NEO) program grant from NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office. At the time, the asteroid was given the tentative name 2002 VE68. Skiff said he didn’t realize the asteroid’s significance and forgot about it until a radio show host contacted him in 2023 and suggested naming it Zoozve.<\/span><\/p>\n

Shortly after Skiff’s discovery, a team of astronomers, including Seppo Mikkola of the University of Turku in Finland and Paul Wiegert of the University of Western Ontario in London, determined that it was the first object of its kind ever discovered. They believe that Zoozwe may have been a satellite of Venus for at least 7,000 years, and that Earth’s gravity helped push Zoozwe into its current orbit.<\/span><\/p>\n

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