A Look Inside Venus

We all hope you’ve been enjoying waking up at 5:00 in the morning to see the incredible array of planets the past several weeks.  Giant Jupiter is now leading the lineup in the southeast, just below Regulus, followed by dimmer, ruddy Mars, and trailing behind is Venus, the third brightest object in our sky. 

For much of my young life, Venus, named after the goddess of beauty and love, was this real enigmatic object that defied explanation.  Its clouds were so thick, no light could pass through; Venus was truly also the goddess of mystery.  But, then came modern science, leading us to realize that the most beautiful object to grace our sky was also akin to Hades, with a carbon dioxide atmosphere creating a runaway greenhouse surface temperature of over 900 degrees F, and having virtually no difference between day and night temperatures.  Plus, any rain that occurs there comes from sulfuric acid, which, because of the fast cloud motion surrounding the planet, never strikes the ground.  Also, the atmosphere around Venus is over 90 times ours, making any landing thoughts impossible.

For those of us who are left-handed, so is Venus.  It actually rotates clockwise, from the perspective of someone looking from above the solar system, or, in other words, it is inclined 177 degrees from the vertical.  No other planet is so unique.  And, not only is its rotation the slowest of all the planets – 243 of our days – this is slower than its revolution period, about 225 days, the only planet that does this.

It wasn’t until the Magellan mission, with its synthetic aperture radar, allowed us to “map” features on this planet.  Suddenly, we were aware of actual craters – all very large because of the sizes of the space rocks that had to survive the atmosphere to crash onto the surface – geyser-like mushroom-looking features, and very large volcanoes, one of which actually has two caldera at the top, which, when this was first identified was called – after a popular television show of that day – Twin Peaks. 

Its incredible number of volcanoes dotting the surface has scientists believing  that Venus might have undergone a cleansing of its surface about ¾ of a billion years ago, meaning the surface we are aware of is fairly recent.  Why this happened is rather unknown, including the possibility that something could be happening now.  The European Space Agency’s Venus Express, which had been traveling around our neighbor for several years, recently ended its life by racing through the Venusian atmosphere, but not before it appeared to reveal the possibility of active volcanism happening today, meaning that, if true, there appear to be three volcanically active bodies in our solar system: The Earth, Jupiter’s innermost Galilean satellite Io, and now our closest planetary neighbor.

In the meantime, though, keep watching Venus as it slowly travels closer toward the Sun within the next few weeks.  Venus will soon leave the morning sky, and then, once again, will join the evening western horizon.   More of you, I’m sure, will take the time to enjoy the brilliance of our third brightest celestial body then, but, if you are awake in the early morning, please run outside, even for just a few seconds, to enjoy Venus with Jupiter and Mars.  You’ll be glad you did.