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The Planet Venus

More likely life would come through terra forming. Remember I first got interested in that sort of thing back in 1973. There was an article in an edition of the Sunday Telegraph magazine by Carl Sagan on terraforming Venus.

Maybe it was planted by MI6.
 
ramonmercado said:
There was an article in an edition of the Sunday Telegraph magazine by Carl Sagan on terraforming Venus.

Maybe it was planted by MI6.
Undoubtedly! :twisted:
 
Another surprise:

Venus springs ozone layer surprise
By Jennifer Carpenter, Science reporter, BBC News

Scientists have discovered that Venus has an ozone layer.
The thin layer, which is hundred of times less dense than the Earth's, was discovered by the European Space Agency's Venus Express craft, researchers report in the journal Icarus.

Until now, ozone layers have only been detected in the atmospheres of Earth and Mars.
The find could help astronomers refine their hunt for life on other planets.

The European spacecraft spied the ozone layer when focusing on stars through Venus' atmosphere.
The distant stars appeared fainter than expected, because the ozone layer absorbed some of their ultraviolet light.

The paper's lead author Franck Montmessin, of the LATMOS atmospheric research centre in France, explained that Venus' ozone layer sits 100km up; about three times the height of our own.

The ozone - a molecule containing three oxygen atoms - formed when sunlight broke down carbon dioxide in the Venusian atmosphere to form oxygen molecules.
On Earth, ozone, which absorbs much of the Sun's harmful UV-rays preventing them reaching the surface, is formed in a similar way.
However, this process is supplemented by oxygen released by carbon dioxide-munching microbes.

Speaking of the international team's find, Hakan Svedhem, ESA project scientist for the Venus Express mission, said: "This ozone detection tells us a lot about the circulation and the chemistry of Venus's atmosphere.
"Beyond that, it is yet more evidence of the fundamental similarity between the rocky planets, and shows the importance of studying Venus to understand them all."

Some astrobiologists assume that the presence of oxygen, carbon, and ozone in an atmosphere indicates that life exists on a planet's surface.
The new results negate that assumption - the mere presence of oxygen in an atmosphere is now not enough evidence to start looking for life.
However, the presence of large quantities of these gases, as in the Earth's atmosphere, is probably still a good lead, the scientists said.
"We can use these new observations to test and refine the scenarios for the detection of life on other worlds," said Dr Montmessin.

science-environment-15203281
 
Ozone is supposed to be a biomarker, although I'm not quite sure why.

Perhaps the mere existence of free oxygen is enough to be a biomarker in some circumstances, but we know it occurs on Europa, Ganymede and elsewhere, so it isn't conclusive.
 
Russian Scientist's Claim of Life on Venus Proven False
By Natalie Wolchover, Life's Little Mysteries
SPACE.com – Mon, Jan 23, 2012

A respected Russian scientist claims to have found signs of life on Venus in photographs taken by a Soviet probe 30 years ago. However, outside analysis suggests he is breathing life into an assortment of camera lens covers and image blurs.

According to the Russian news service Ria Novosti, Leonid Ksanfomaliti, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences who worked on unmanned Soviet missions to Venus during the 1970s and '80s, has written a new article in the journal Solar System Research. In the article, he calls attention to several objects photographed by the Venera-13 landing probe, a spacecraft that landed on Venus in 1982. The objects — including features described as a disc and a scorpion — appear to change locations from one photo to the next. "Let's boldly suggest that the objects' morphological features would allow us to say that they are living," Ksanfomaliti stated, according to Ria Novosti.

Whether the scientist really has suggested that the old photographs contain living creatures that were somehow overlooked previously, or whether his words have been mistranslated, misconstrued or should have been quietly ignored, the claim has made headlines around the globe.

In one image,the Venera-13 landing probe is seen parked on the rocky Venusian foreground, and an object shaped somewhat like a crab stands inches from the probe. In another image, also taken by Venera-13, this crab-like object appears to be in a different location.

According to Jonathon Hill, a research technician and mission planner at the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University, who processes many of the images taken during NASA's Mars missions, higher-resolution versions of the Venera-13 images show that the crab-like object is actually a mechanical component, not a living creature. The same object shows up in a photograph taken by an identical landing probe, Venera-14, which landed nearby on Venus.

"If those objects were already on the surface of Venus, what are the chances that Venera 13 and 14, which landed nearly 1,000 kilometers apart, would both land inches away from the only ones in sight and they would be in the same positions relative to the spacecraft? It makes much more sense that it's a piece of the lander designed to break off during the deployment of one of the scientific instruments," Hill told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to SPACE.com.

According to NASA, the half-circle components are camera lens covers that popped off the Venera probes after they landed. As for why they appear to be in different places in the two Venera-13 photos, "Venera-13 had two cameras, one in front and one in back. The one image shows the front camera lens cap and the other shows the rear camera lens cap, not one lens cap that moved," said Ted Stryk, a photo editor who reprocesses and enhances many NASA and Soviet space program images.

In fact, the half-circle objects are famous for being lens caps, because the one that popped off Venera-14's camera landed exactly where a spring-loaded arm was meant to touch the Venusian surface in order to measure its compressibility. The lander ended up measuring properties of the cap.

The other photograph highlighted by Ksanfomaliti, which supposedly shows a scorpion-like creature, contains a blur. "The features that Ksanfomaliti shows are nothing more than processed noise, at best, in some particularly bad versions of the images. They are not in the original data," Stryk said.

Or, as Hill put it, the image is an example of "letting your mind see patterns in low-resolution data that simply aren't real."

SOURCE: http://news.yahoo.com/russian-scientist ... 03708.html
 
Presumably, these are the "crabs"
v14colorpancb.jpg
and
060911_venera13_sfc_02.jpg


The person's website for the first photo, http://www.strykfoto.org/ has lots of good space photos.
 
kamalktk said:
Presumably, these are the "crabs"...
If you cropped that first photo to 600 pix wide, the thread wouldn't be the screenbuster it is!
 
Fantastic! Those are the first hi-res pictures I've seen of the surface of Venus.
 
it looks surprisingly not different to the pics of Mars or Titan, considering how different the environments are.

all of which unfortunately look like that bloody quarry from certain old BBC sci-fi shows :? really takes the mystery out of space exploration.
 
BlackRiverFalls said:
it looks surprisingly not different to the pics of Mars or Titan, considering how different the environments are.

all of which unfortunately look like that bloody quarry from certain old BBC sci-fi shows :? really takes the mystery out of space exploration.

But it is the BBC quarry! You don't think they really sent a craft to Venus, do you?
 
ramonmercado said:
BlackRiverFalls said:
it looks surprisingly not different to the pics of Mars or Titan, considering how different the environments are.

all of which unfortunately look like that bloody quarry from certain old BBC sci-fi shows :? really takes the mystery out of space exploration.

But it is the BBC quarry! You don't think they really sent a craft to Venus, do you?

Not BBC - ITV! Alternative 3, people!
 
Dunno if I've suddenly entered an alternative reality but I swear that when those pictures were released years ago, the object was explained as part of the lander that was supposed to drop off when it landed - according to the Soviet space agency who released them.

Edit: Yup, my memory's not playing tricks after all. the Wiki entry on Venera13 says that they are the lens caps that popped off after landing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera_13
 
They're not trying to say that'a an animal of some sort surely?
 
So after how many years? of looking at one of the most famous off world photos ever somebody is shouting 'oooh crabs look crabs!'

Good luck to them with that.
 
Is Venus slowing down?
Link is dead. The current link is:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/02/scienceshot-venus-slowing-down

Here's the text of the MIA item.
ScienceShot: Is Venus Slowing Down?

By Sid PerkinsFeb. 10, 2012 , 11:32 AM

Venus, our closest planetary neighbor, has the slowest rotational period of any world in our solar system—and according to data recently gathered by the European Space Agency's Venus Express orbiter, it's getting slower. In the 1990s, NASA's Magellan probe measured the Venusian day, the length of time needed for the planet to complete one rotation, to be 243.0185 Earth days. But new measurements by Venus Express (artist's concept above), which has been orbiting the cloud-shrouded planet since 2006, reveal the current rotational period to be about 6.5 minutes slower, researchers report this month in Icarus. Although that difference seems minor, it places some features on Venus about 20 kilometers away from where scientists were expecting—a big deal for future missions looking to set a lander or rover down at a particular site. Reasons for the rotational slowdown aren't clear. Friction caused by fierce weather systems may be slowing the planet's rotation, just as weather and tides cause Earth's day to vary. Or, gravitational interactions between Earth and Venus when the planets pass near each other in orbit may be sapping our neighbor of its angular momentum. Finally, the researchers suggest, Magellan's 4-year mission may simply have occurred at a time when the Venusian rate of rotation was temporarily faster than normal, because the new data actually match long-term measurements made by radar from Earth.
 
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Researchers mulling inflatable airship VAMP for flying the skies of Venus
March 4th, 2014 in Astronomy & Space / Space Exploration

VAMP released from Venus orbiting spacecraft and inflating exoatmospherically for benign entry.

VAMP released from Venus orbiting spacecraft and inflating exoatmospherically for benign entry.

(Phys.org) —Researchers at Northrup Grumman and L'Garde are mulling the idea of a Venus Atmospheric Maneuverable Platform (VAMP) inflatable spacecraft—they have published an outline of their idea on NASA's web site.

The traditional approach to sending research craft to other planets, such as Mars, is to build something mechanical and then figure out a way to get it to the planet's surface intact, using a variety of methods (parachute, inflatable protection, etc.). In this new effort, the researchers have come up with a craft that doesn't land on the surface, but instead simply flies around in the planet's atmosphere. To make that happen, they have designed an incredibly light (just 992 pounds) inflatable drone that doesn't require the development of any new technology—that means it could be made relatively inexpensively and could be ready for construction as soon as NASA agrees to pay for it. The team predicts the VAMP could operate for approximately a year before the gas inside is lost.

The overall idea is to carry the drone—VAMP—to Venus using a conventional spaceship. Once there, the VAMP would be deployed while still tethered to its mothership so that it could be filled with a gas, such as hydrogen. Once filled, it would be set loose to fly in the atmosphere—the elevation would depend on how much gear it would be carrying. The VAMP would use engines (to turn propellers) that get their power from solar panels and the heat that escapes from a bit of onboard radioactive plutonium-238 as it decays. At night, the VAMP would serve as a glider making good use of its 151 foot wingspan. Because Venus has such high winds, the team has calculated that the VAMP could circle the planet every six days. The craft could be steered by engineers back on Earth via signals relayed through the mothership.

The basis for suggesting such a mission to Venus is to better understand the planet's atmosphere, which many suggest is similar to what Earth's would be like if it were to succumb to global warming. If the mission proves successful, it would be an almost certainty that other such drones would be sent to Mars, or even the moons of Saturn, offering an entirely new approach to studying our neighbors in the solar system.

© 2014 Phys.org

"Researchers mulling inflatable airship VAMP for flying the skies of Venus." March 4th, 2014. http://phys.org/news/2014-03-mulling-in ... venus.html
 
A manned (personed?) mission to Venus. Even if just the clouds. Might solve some mysteries; vid at link.

NASA's Systems Analysis and Concepts Directorate has issued a report outlining a possible way for humans to visit Venus, rather than Mars—by hovering in the atmosphere instead of landing on the surface. The hovering vehicle, which they call a High Altitude Venus Operational Concept (HAVOC), would resemble a blimp with solar panels on top, and would allow people to do research just 50 kilometers above the surface of the planet.

Most everyone knows that NASA wants to send people to Mars—that planet also gets most of the press. Mars is attractive because it looks more like Earth and is relatively close to us. The surface of Venus on the other hand, though slightly closer, is not so attractive, with temperatures that can melt lead and atmospheric pressure 92 times that of Earth. There's also that thick carbon dioxide atmosphere with sulfuric acid clouds, lots of earthquakes, volcanoes going off and terrifying lightning bolts. So, why would anyone rather go to Venus than Mars? Because of far lower radiation and much better solar energy. ...

http://phys.org/news/2014-12-nasa-possibilities-mission-venus.html
 
The trend toward explaining planetary histories via major impact events has now extended to Venus ...

A Giant Planetary Smashup May Have Turned Venus Hot and Hellish

A collision with a large object may have triggered changes deep inside the planet that ultimately affected its atmosphere

... Planetary scientists have been trying to figure out what happened to poor Venus to trigger this dramatic transformation. Now simulations have offered an intriguing—if still very early—theory: Venus developed its stifling atmosphere following a collision with a Texas-sized object.

Cedric Gillmann of the Royal Observatory of Belgium and his colleagues simulated what would happen if various sized objects crashed into Venus. They found that immediate effects, such as blowing part of the atmosphere into space, made only small changes that the planet could quickly recover from. But a significant impact could have driven changes deep within the mantle that could have changed the geology and atmosphere of the planet over hundreds of millions of years, especially if it occurred when Venus was relatively young.

"There are some periods of time when a large impact can be enough to switch a cool surface to a hot surface and change the history of the planet," Gillmann says.

Full Story: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/scien...-have-turned-venus-hot-and-hellish-180958377/
 
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Was Venus the first habitable planet in our solar system?
Often referred to as Earth’s evil twin, Venus is the solar system’s hottest planet. But research suggests that Venus may have had vast oceans and a balmy climate
Hannah Devlin Science correspondent
Monday 17 October 2016 11.37 BST

Its surface is hot enough to melt lead and its skies are darkened by toxic clouds of sulphuric acid. Venus is often referred to as Earth’s evil twin, but conditions on the planet were not always so hellish, according to research that suggests it may have been the first place in the solar system to have become habitable.

The study, due to be presented this week at the at the American Astronomical Society Meeting in Pasadena, concludes that at a time when primitive bacteria were emerging on Earth, Venus may have had a balmy climate and vast oceans up to 2,000 metres (6,562 feet) deep.

Michael Way, who led the work at the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, said: “If you lived three billion years ago at a low latitude and low elevation the surface temperatures would not have been that different from that of a place in the tropics on Earth,” he said.

The Venusian skies would have been cloudy with almost continual rain lashing down in some regions, however. “So while you might get nice sunsets you would have mostly overcast skies during the day and precipitation,” Way added.

Crucially, if the calculations are correct the oceans may have remained until 715m years ago - a long enough period of climate stability for microbial life to have plausibly sprung up.

“The oceans of ancient Venus would have had more constant temperatures, and if life begins in the oceans - something which we are not certain of on Earth - then this would be a good starting place,” said Way.

Other planetary scientists agreed that, despite the differing fates of the two planets, early Earth and Venus may have been similar.
Professor Takehiko Satoh, who works on the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Venus Climate Orbiter (“Akatsuki”) mission, said: “Habitable or not, I’m not in a position to answer. Environment-wise, probably Venus once had an ocean and probably the environment of Venus and the Earth might have been similar.”

With an average surface temperature of 462C (864F), Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system today, thanks to its proximity to the sun and its impenetrable carbon dioxide atmosphere, 90 times denser than Earth’s. At some point in the planet’s history this led to a runaway greenhouse effect.

Previous US and Soviet landers sent to Venus have survived only a few hours on the surface before being destroyed.
Way and colleagues simulated the Venusian climate at various time points between 2.9bn and 715m years ago, employing similar models to those used to predict future climate change on Earth. The scientists fed some basic assumptions into the model, including the presence of water, the intensity of the sunlight and how fast Venus was rotating. In this virtual version, 2.9bn years ago Venus had an average surface temperature of 11C (52F) and this only increased to an average of 15C (59F) by 715m years ago, as the sun became more powerful.
More precise measurements of the chemical makeup of Venus’s surface and atmosphere could help establish how much water the planet had in the past, and when this began to disappear.

Some of this information may be filled in by the Akatsuki mission, which is observing the Venusian weather systems in unprecedented detail. The spacecraft was supposed to enter orbit about the planet in 2010, but after its main engine blew out, it instead spent five years drifting around the sun like a miniature artificial planet. Last year, scientists used altitude thrusters to redirect it into an orbit, and the mission could yet answer longstanding questions about our planetary neighbour, including whether it has volcanic activity, whether lightning strikes in the sky and why its atmosphere is rotating 60 times faster than the planet itself.

However, searching for traces of ancient microbial life would need a lander, and would be significantly more challenging.
“It would take a great deal of technology development, and money of course, to build the requisite landing craft to survive the surface conditions of present day Venus and to be able to dig into the surface,” said Way. “But if the investments were made it would be possible to search for such signs of life, including chemical traces.”

Details of the study are also published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

https://www.theguardian.com/science...he-first-habitable-planet-in-our-solar-system
 
Could Dark Streaks in Venus' Clouds Be Signs of Alien Life?
By Keith Cooper, Astrobiology Magazine | January 11, 2017 05:11pm ET

vamp-venus-airship.jpg

An artist's impression of the uncrewed Venus Atmospheric Maneuverable Platform (VAMP) flying through Venus' clouds.
Credit: Northrop Grumman
The question of life on Venus, of all places, is intriguing enough that a team of U.S. and Russian scientists working on a proposal for a new mission to the second planet — named Venera-D — are considering including the search for life in its mission goals.

If all goes as planned, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) could one day be cruising the thick, sulfuric-acid clouds of Venus to help determine whether dark streaks that appear to absorb ultraviolet radiation could be evidence of microbial life.

Venus has long been a focus of Russian planetary science, which has the proud legacy of the record-breaking Venera space probes that landed on the Venusian surface in the late 1970s and early 1980s. [Mysterious Venus: 10 Weird Facts]

With many questions remaining unanswered, the joint mission of Roscosmos and NASA, if approved, would see an orbiter launch toward Venus in 2025 with the aim to make remote-sensing observations of the planet and its atmosphere; deploy a lander on the surface; and search for future landing sites.

Among several possible additions to the mission are a small sub-orbiter to study Venus' magnetosphere, and either a balloon or an UAV taking measurements of the atmosphere over a long duration. ...

http://www.space.com/35294-alien-life-venus-mission-concept.html
 
Err...lower radiation? o_O

It can't make it through the atmosphere. Whereas what we call an atmosphere on Mars would be a vacuum if we had it in a jar on Earth.

The pressure on Venus theoretically might not be too bad higher up on some of the mountains. Although molten tungsten snow probably sucks.
 
It can't make it through the atmosphere. Whereas what we call an atmosphere on Mars would be a vacuum if we had it in a jar on Earth.

The pressure on Venus theoretically might not be too bad higher up on some of the mountains. Although molten tungsten snow probably sucks.
Aha! Yes, I hadn't thought of that.
 
Venus wave may be Solar System's biggest
By Paul RinconScience editor, BBC News website
Share
_93588937_mediaitem93588213.jpg
Image copyrightPLANET-C
Image captionThe feature is generated as Venus' lower atmosphere flows over mountainous topography
A giant wave in the atmosphere of Venus may be the biggest of its kind in the Solar System.

The feature, observed by a Japanese spacecraft, is thought to be generated in a broadly similar way to the surface ripples that form as water flows over rocks on a stream bed.

In this case, the wave is thought to form as the lower atmosphere flows over mountains on Venus' surface.

The findings are published in Nature Communications journal.

Just after entering orbit around Venus in 2015, the Akatsuki orbiter observed a bow-shaped feature in the upper atmosphere over several days.

Curiously, the bright structure - which stretched for 10,000km - remained stationary at the altitude of Venus' cloud tops. This is difficult to reconcile with what we know about Venus' thick upper atmosphere, in which clouds streak by at 100 metres per second (m/s).

The clouds travel much faster than the slowly rotating planet below, where a Venusian day lasts longer than it takes for the planet to orbit the Sun.

_93588936_mediaitem93588935.jpg
Image copyrightAKIHIRO IKESHITA
Image captionAkatsuki was launched in May 2010 and arrived in Venus orbit in December 2015
Makoto Taguchi from Rikkyo University in Tokyo, Atsushi Yamazaki from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa) and others show that the bright region was fixed over a mountainous region of the surface known as Aphrodite Terra. It was also found to be hotter than surrounding parts of the atmosphere.

The researchers propose that the phenomenon is the result of a gravity wave that is generated as the lower atmosphere passes over mountains and then propagates upwards through Venus' thick atmosphere. Gravity waves ensue when a fluid - such as a liquid, gas or plasma - is displaced from a position of equilibrium.

Dr Colin Wilson, a planetary scientist from the University of Oxford, who was not involved in the study, explained: "If you have a stream and it's flowing over a rock, you get the gravity waves propagating upwards through the water. At the surface of the stream, you will see it as changes in height.

"What's happening here is slightly different, because we're seeing it in cloud top temperatures. But the air particles are moving up and down, very much as the water particles are moving up and down."

Venus: Earth's 'evil twin'
_93620813_mediaitem93620812.jpg
Image copyrightNASA
Image captionVenus' surface features as viewed by the Magellan spacecraft
  • Earth's closest planetary neighbour is the third brightest object in the sky after the Sun and Moon;
  • Venus is slightly smaller than Earth and has undergone runaway greenhouse warming; temperatures at the surface reach 467C - hot enough to melt lead. The hellish conditions have prompted some to tag Venus as our planet's "evil twin";
  • A dense atmosphere composed chiefly of carbon dioxide (CO2) generates a surface pressure 93 times greater than that at the surface of the Earth. This is equivalent to the pressure 1km beneath Earth's oceans
  • The Soviet Union successfully landed several craft on Venus - some of which operated for more than an hour before they were destroyed by the extreme conditions
  • Several spacecraft have also studied the planet from orbit, including Akatsuki, Venus Express and Nasa's Magellan mission.
_93620815_mediaitem93620814.jpg
Image copyrightNASA
Image captionSoviet probes such as Venera 13, which landed on 1 March 1982, returned images of Venus' surface
In their study, the researchers write: "The present study shows direct evidence of the existence of stationary gravity waves, and it further shows that such stationary gravity waves can have a very large scale - perhaps the greatest ever observed in the Solar System."

On this point Dr Wilson told BBC News: "I think we should give them that... it stretches almost from pole to pole, which is phenomenal in distance.

He added: "The thing is you can't have a feature like that on Jupiter because the planet's fast rotation means (the atmosphere) is broken up into belts. Venus' slow rotation lets you have a whole feature like this."

It has been unclear whether gravity waves generated by mountainous topography can travel upwards to the Venusian cloud tops. But the observations suggest that atmospheric dynamics may be more complex at depth than some scientists had supposed.

Dr Wilson was involved with the European Space Agency's Venus Express mission, which ended in December 2014. Toward the end of the mission, the spacecraft detected tantalising potential evidence for present-day volcanism on Earth's neighbour.

"[The Venus Express team] only saw that in one location on Venus. The fact that Akatsuki is there for another couple of years equipped with the right sort of cameras, they could detect more of these potential active volcanic events," Dr Wilson told BBC News.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-38638067
 
More evbidence for Venus having an ocean in the past. I love those SF novels and stories where Venus is habitable in alternative realities. Recent examples being: Old Venus is a "retro Venus science fiction"-themed anthology edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois; The Sky People by S. M. Stirling.

Evidence mounts for an ocean on early Venus
Second planet from the sun may have been watery millions of years after its birth, simulations suggest

BY ASHLEY YEAGER 7:00AM, AUGUST 1, 2017

NOT ALWAYS HELLISH Venus is completely uninhabitable now. But simulations suggest that early in its history the planet had a liquid ocean.

New simulations suggest that if the now-hellish planet had just the right amount of cloud cover, carbon dioxide and water to start with, Venus could have formed an ocean. The result, published online July 18 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, provides a new clue to whether Venus could have ever supported life.

The finding could also help planetary scientists in their search for habitable planets far beyond the solar system by revealing what conditions in a planet’s atmosphere and on its surface may make it suitable for life.

“This work plays into a much bigger puzzle of understanding the habitability of exoplanets,” says Michael Way, an astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City who was not involved in the study

Last year, Way and colleagues reported that Venus’ slow rotation — one day lasts roughly 116 Earth days — could have led to a buildup of continual cloud cover that allowed for average temperatures of around 15° Celsius as recently as 715 million years ago. Those cooler conditions, compared with Venus’ inferno today at 460°, could also have made it possible for the planet to have a shallow ocean (SN Online: 8/26/16). The new work supports that study, revealing the delicate interplay of cloud cover, carbon dioxide and water that would produce an ocean. ...

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/evidence-mounts-ocean-early-venus
 
Although I'm tempted to start off a new thread called 'Venus rising - the morning star' I shall resist the temptation, and see if the mods consider it's fine to tap-in to the broad church of this existing strand.

The northern skies these crystal-clear December mornings are lit by the amazing sight that is Venus, ascending from the southern horizon in the small morning hours of night, and stubbornly-fighting the sun well after dawn.

The planet splits the sky with a compact brightness that easily beats the Moon's pale glow, and is like a tail-less torch hung high above us.

My astronomical knowledge seems to be a lot more limited than I knew, but if I understand correctly (there's a chance that I don't) the planet Venus has rotational phases like our own Moon, and therefore is somehow appearing brighter from our perspective just now (we may also be relatively closer to each-other just now: but that is child-like guesswork on my part).

But clearly, it is a majestic sight, acting currently as The Morning Star. If you've not seen it, please try to have a look. And remember- even after sun-up, it still cuts the sky like a stretched tear in the blue-black velvet of space.

And if anyone can masterfully explain why it is so....different & dominant, just now, I would be very much obliged.
 
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