One of the stranger objects in our solar system is also one that gets very little attention
in comparison to planets like Mars.
In reality, however, Venus stands as a planet completely unique in the solar system, and
harbors some of the solar system’s oddest natural features.
So here are ten strange aspects of Planet Venus.
Number 10.
It Snows Metal on Venus.
When radar images of the surface of Venus were taken it was noticed that certain high
elevation areas on venus were highly reflective.
Initially, the reason for this was unknown, and explanations such as loose soil and weathering
differences were advanced, but none fit very well.
It was later found that Venus may contain minerals that evaporate in the intense heat
of the lowlands, and then precipitate out at cooler, higher altitudes in the form of
lead and bismuth sulfides.
This happens at altitudes higher than 2600 meters in a process that can be compared to
earth snow, but only superficially.
The two are in reality radically different.
Number 9.
It’s a Planet Gone Horribly, Horribly Wrong.
It has been said that Venus is, in many ways, Earth’s twin.
It’s Evil Twin.
Venus was once very earth-like, and may have even had oceans of liquid water for a time
billions of years ago.
But then something happened, and Venus transformed itself into the vision of hell that it is
today.
But what?
It’s thought that Venus is an example of a runaway greenhouse effect.
As the young sun increased in luminosity, which it’s still doing today and will eventually
bake earth, it’s thought that the Venusian oceans began to evaporate.
Water vapor is an insulating greenhouse gas, and would have warmed that planet’s atmosphere
further.
Eventually, the oceans boiled away completely.
But today Venus has comparatively little water vapor, so where did it go?
In short, it’s thought to have escaped into space.
One clue for this is another odd aspect of Venus.
It has a very high ratio of deuterium to hydrogen in its atmosphere.
It’s 150 times greater than that of earth.
It could be that Venus water vapor made it high enough in the atmosphere to be broken
down by solar radiation.
The resulting oxygen would recombine, providing some of Venus’s current carbon dioxide atmosphere,
which is also a greenhouse gas.
But the hydrogen would escape, being too light for Venus to hold onto.
But the isotope deuterium is heavier, and would generally be more easily retained, resulting
in the higher concentrations in the atmosphere over time.
It’s essentially the leftovers of the ocean.
The end result is the Venus we have today, with searing hot surface temperatures, extreme
atmospheric pressure, and a runaway greenhouse effect on a world that at one time seems have
been earth-like.
But that’s not the end of the story for Venus.
In the far future, it’s an attractive candidate for terraforming and may someday end up as
true twin of earth, and like earth, inhabited by humans.
Number 8.
Venus Has Astonishingly High Wind Speeds
Venus’ upper atmosphere in some ways behaves like earth, for example wind speeds in the
upper atmosphere are comparable to earth’s jet stream, which can exceed speeds of 100
miles per hour.
Generally, wind speeds deeper within earth’s atmosphere are slower, except under certain
weather conditions, such as a tornado.
Venus, however, has a very different lower atmosphere, and much, much higher wind speeds.
Lower in Venus’ atmosphere, wind speeds can reach past 700 kilometers per hour, or
four hundred miles per hour.
This is far faster than any wind speed ever recorded on earth.
But as you move even deeper into the atmosphere, near the surface, the extremely high atmospheric
pressure drops wind speeds to almost nothing, and behaves a bit more like liquid flowing
than gas moving.
But, at pressures that great, even slow winds can move rocks.
And, there’s also a mystery involved with Venus’ winds.
Based on cloud top observations, Venus’s wind speeds appear to be increasing over time,
suggesting a cycle of some sort.
It’s unclear what’s causing that.
Number 7.
The Entire Planet has Recently Been Resurfaced.
One noteworthy thing about Venus’s surface is that has very little cratering when compared
to other objects in the solar system.
This suggests that its surface is young, having recently been resurfaced an estimated 300
to 500 million years ago.
Earth resurfaces itself as well, but in our case in addition to weathering we also have
plate tectonics that return material from the crust to the mantle and vice versa.
Venus does not appear to have active plate tectonics.
This opens up a very apocalyptic possibility.
That as radioactive materials in Venus’ core decay, they produce heat, but that heat
becomes trapped causing the mantle of the planet to heat up until eventually mantle
material is so hot it forces itself up through the crust causing a planet-wide lava flow.
In short, Venus may periodically crack open and resurface itself.
Number 6.
From the Perspective of Earth, Venus does Strange Things
Being among the brightest objects in the sky, Venus has been watched in the night sky by
humans for many thousands of years, probably the entirety of our existence on this planet
in fact.
But also, due to that brightness, Venus can often be observed in the day through a telescope
if you know where to look.
But, historically, occasionally, somehow, it seems to have been fully visible to the
naked eye in daylight.
In 1716, Edmund Halley calculated its brightness when residents of the city of London became
alarmed over a daylight apparition of Venus.
Other times this seems to have happened was during the 1865 second inauguration of Abraham
Lincoln.
More, Napoleon Bonaparte likewise witnessed a daylight apparition of Venus while in Luxembourg.
In the past, these daylight apparitions were looked at superstitiously, but in reality
Venus can become naked eye visible from earth if the planet is positioned well and seeing
conditions in the sky are good.
But that’s not the only oddity involved with Venus’ as we see it from earth.
Telescope observations of Venus also hold a mystery known as the ashen light.
Over the centuries there have been reports of a glow on the unilluminated side of Venus,
which like the moon goes through phases.
No one really knows what causes it, or if it really exists.
It could be an illusion, where when observing a small but very bright crescent, it is perceived
by the brain to be a complete circle.
Others have suggest that it may be due to lightning in the Venusian atmosphere, some
kind of auroral activity, and even upper atmosphere chemistry.
Yet, we’ve sent spacecraft to Venus and none of them have detected this light.
On the other hand, reports of it are really persistent, stretching back to 1643 with many
credible astronomers witnessing it, even to the present day.
Number 5.
Venus May or May Not Have a Solid Core
One striking feature of Venus is that it has little or no magnetic field of its own, rather
it effectively borrows the magnetic field it does have from the solar wind, leading
to a comet like magnetic tail quite unlike earth, which internally produces its magnetic
field through convection of liquid in the core.
An earth-like convection deep inside Venus does not appear to be occurring leading to
the possibility that Venus has a solid core.
But if it’s so similar to earth in composition and size, why wouldn’t it be liquid?
Another possibility is that it’s simply too hot for convection to occur, bolstering
the idea that Venus traps heat, and only occasionally releases it when it cracks open and resurfaces
itself, in which case it has a molten core, but one very different from earth.
Number 4.
Venus Rotates Very Slowly … and Backwards
One of the strangest aspects of Venus, and one of the hardest to explain, is the fact
that the planet rotates backwards in respect to the rest of the planets of the solar system.
It also rotates very slowly, it’s day is 243 earth days long, which is actually longer
than its year.
While it might seem intuitive to suspect some past cataclysm is the reason for this, such
as some kind of impact, that doesn’t appear to be the case.
It may be that Venus simply formed a little bit differently within the solar nebula than
the other planets, and that some mix of tidal effects from the sun’s gravitation on Venus’
thick atmosphere and chaotic spin changes through planetary perturbations affected how
it rotates today.
More, it’s unclear what the effects on the planet are with that thick atmosphere and
very high winds.
But Venus may not be without its cataclysms.
If researches at the California Institute of Technology are right, Venus may have once
had a moon created in a similar way to how Earth’s moon is thought to have been created.
A huge object crashed into protovenus and knocked the material off that would coalesce
into a moon.
But, here’s the kicker, about ten million years later another impact reversed Venus’
spin direction.
This would have caused the moon to spiral inward and impact Venus.
Alternatively the strong solar tidal effects might have destabilized the moon, explaining
why Venus is oddly moonless for a planet in our solar system.
Number 3.
Venus May Have Lightning … But it Shouldn’t
When it was first suggested decades ago that Venus might have lightning, it sparked a controversy
within the scientific community in that it really shouldn’t have lightning.
Venus lacks the type of clouds that generally produce lightning, and also lacks the vertical
atmospheric convection that is a major factor in the generation of earth’s lightning.
Yet persistent measurements with exploratory spacecraft have seemingly unambiguously detected
lightning on Venus, and seems to be about as common there as it is here on earth.
What mechanism creates the lightning remains uncertain.
Number 2.
If the Wrong Things Happen Venus May Someday Collide With Earth
The further one tries to project how the future of the solar system will play out, the more
uncertain it is.
Modeling of this often produces varying results.
But what is certain is that it will change and the current arrangement of the planets
will undergo changes and some scenarios can be a bit disturbing, if unlikely.
One possibility is that the planet Mercury could see its orbit become even more elongated
than it already is, causing gravitational interactions with the rest of the solar system
that could eject it entirely from the solar system, or put it on a collision course with
Venus.
Still other possibilities include a small chance of Earth getting ejected from the solar
system, or even a collision where Mars passes very close to earth, disturbing Venus and
Earth and putting them on a collision course.
But, never fear, these are among the least likely scenarios for the future solar system.
What is certain however is that nothing will stop the evolution and aging of the sun and
earth is most definitely in long term danger there.
But, Planetary migration is something that can be managed over very long periods of time.
Yes, it’s possible to move planets, links to a collaboration I did with Fraser Cain
on that very subject in the description below.
And in the far future, if we’re still around, we may be able to avert these collisions by
shepherding the planets using the gravitational influence of asteroids in deliberately altered
orbits over very long periods of time.
Number 1.
Venus May Have Life
At first glance, with all of the heat and pressure, Venus would not seem to be a possible
abode for life, at least as we know.
But in fact, it is a candidate and may be showing signs that some kind of biological
activity is occuring there.
The key to this is the upper atmosphere of Venus, where temperatures and pressure drop
to a situation similar to the surface of Earth.
In fact, this level of Venus’ atmosphere is among the most earth-like places in the
solar system.
Given that Venus once may have had liquid water, it’s possible that microbial life
arose there and as the planet slowly transformed into what it is today that adapted to the
changing conditions and may still be present in the upper atmosphere.
And, we may be seeing clues of this.
The first of these is the chemical carbonyl sulfide.
This chemical is difficult to produce inorganically, though it can be produced through volcanism.
Another odd one are what are known as S8 molecules, which are impervious to the effects of sulfuric
acid.
If the microbes had incorporated these molecules into their makeup, they too might be impervious
to the corrosive effects of the sulfuric acid in Venus’ atmosphere.
S8 molecules are known to exist in Venus’ atmosphere.
More, the Venera missions detected unexplained elongated particulate matter in Venus’ lower
cloud layer that were about the size of a bacterium.
But perhaps the most tantalizing hint are dark streaks that appear in Venus’ cloud
layers that appear to be absorbing UV light and it’s not clear why.
But if those streaks are related to life, then UV could be its energy source.
Hopefully, we won’t have long to wait for an answer, ROSCOSMOS is planning a mission,
Venera D, if sent, may carry equipment to try to detect that life.
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently snowed in, eyeing
ANNA suspiciously and trying to warm up after making videos in the driver’s seat of the
LeBaron for a while.
Speaking of, do check out my talk show channel, Event Horizon, where I recently did an interview
with one of the team members of the Chime radio telescope, which recently discovered
the second known repeating fast radio burst, link in the description below and the end
screen.
And, coming soon on Event Horizon, an epic second interview with Dr. Avi Loeb, perhaps
the most cited scientist on this channel, along with more scientists and even a Star
Trek Alumnus for a nice sci fi show and be sure to check out my books at your favorite
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interesting, weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live.