Top 10 interesting facts about the planet Venus

Throughout history, Venus has been one of the planets that many civilizations have recognized. Named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty, she was also known to the Greeks as Aphrodite. All planets in our solar system are named after male gods or mythological creatures, with the exception of Venus.

It is the only planet named after a woman, and this is believed to be because she is the brightest planet. At one time, some astronomers in the past thought that Venus was actually two stars. This was due to the fact that she appeared as a morning and evening star.

Because its glow is so bright, astronomers have suggested that the planet itself must be beautiful. However, as soon as space exploration began, scientists realized that the planet had a terrible environment.

Many missions have been sent to Venus, but it’s nearly impossible to get to the planet’s surface due to its extremely high temperatures.

Without further ado, here are 10 interesting facts about Venus for kids, the information is suitable for a report.

10 Volcanoes, lava and plateaus

Along with intense tectonic activity, Venus has experienced many volcanic eruptions. The largest of the impacts are the vast lava fields that cover much of the hilly plains. They are in many ways similar to the fields of overlapping lava flows seen on other planets, including Earth, but they are much more extensive.

Individual flows are mostly long and thin, indicating that the erupting lavas were very fluid and could therefore flow long distances over gentle slopes.

9. No water or similar substance

When astronomers first pointed their rudimentary telescopes at Venus, they saw a world shrouded in clouds. Here on Earth, clouds mean water, so early astronomers imagined a tropical world with constant rainfall.

The truth, of course, is that the thick atmosphere on Venus is almost entirely carbon dioxide. In fact, the atmospheric pressure on the surface of Venus exceeds the earth’s by as much as 92 times.

There is no water on the surface of Venus, in the form of rivers, lakes or oceans.. The average temperature on Venus is 461,85 C. Since water boils at 100 C, it simply cannot be on the surface.

8. The hottest planet in the solar system

Venus is the second planet from the Sun and has a temperature that is maintained at 462 degrees Celsius no matter where you go. It is the hottest planet in the solar system.

So what makes Venus hotter than Mercury? Mercury has no atmosphere, and the atmosphere, as we know, can hold heat. Any heat that Mercury receives from the Sun is quickly lost to space.

Venus is nearly identical in size to Earth and was difficult to see due to its very thick carbon dioxide atmosphere. This thick atmosphere makes Venus’s surface hotter because the heat doesn’t escape back into space.

The atmosphere on Venus is so strong that the pressure will be ninety-two times greater than what you experience standing on a beach at sea level.

7. Thick impenetrable atmosphere

Venus’s atmosphere is so hot and thick that you wouldn’t survive a visit to the planet – you couldn’t breathe the air, you’d be crushed by the sheer weight of the atmosphere, and you’d burn up at surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead.

The atmosphere of Venus is mostly carbon dioxide, and clouds of sulfuric acid completely cover the planet.. The atmosphere traps a small amount of solar energy that reaches the surface along with the heat that the planet itself gives off.

This greenhouse effect has made the surface and lower atmosphere of Venus one of the hottest places in the solar system!

6. Sulfur rains

The atmosphere of Venus supports opaque clouds of sulfuric acid ranging in length from 50 to 70 km. Under the clouds, a layer of fog seeps up to about 30 km, and under it it is clear. Above the dense layer of CO2 are thick clouds, which are mainly composed of sulfur oxide and droplets of sulfuric acid.

The fact is that there is no precipitation on the surface of Venus – while sulfuric acid rain falls in the upper atmosphere, they evaporate before reaching the surface for about 25 km.

In addition, the concentration of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere, which dropped by a factor of 10 between 1978 and 1986, indicates that atmospheric sulfur actually comes from volcanic eruptions.

5. Rotates counterclockwise

Venus is an oddball in many ways. For example, it spins in the opposite direction from most other planets, including the Earth, so that on Venus the sun rises in the west.

Scientists are still puzzled reverse, or retrograde, rotation of Venus. A team of scientists from the French research institute Astronomie et Systemes Dynamiques has come up with a new explanation. This theory claims that Venus originally rotated in the same direction as most other planets, and, in a sense, still does: at some point, it simply flipped its axis 180 degrees.

In other words, it rotates in the same direction as it always does, only upside down, so that when viewed from other planets from other planets, the rotation seems to be reversed.

4. Day and year on the planet

On our planet, sidereal days last 23 hours 56 minutes and 4,1 seconds, while a solar day lasts exactly 24 hours. In the case of Venus, it takes a whopping 243,025 days for a planet to rotate once on its own axis, which is the longest orbital period of any planet in the solar system. Besides, It takes about 224,7 Earth days to orbit the Sun.

3. brightest after the sun and moon

In good weather, Venus is the first planet that night sky watchers on the planet can spot, and it’s visible even before sunset if you know exactly where to look in the southwestern sky.

The planet is gaining altitude at dusk, boldly showing itself after six months of hiding behind any inconvenient obstacles near the southwestern horizon.

The dazzling brightness of Venus is the result of cosmic geometry.. As the planet moves around the Sun, observers on Earth can see it illuminated from all directions. This causes Venus to go through “phases” similar to the Moon.

When Venus is on the opposite side of the Sun from the Earth, at a point called “superb conjunction”, it is fully illuminated and we see it as a “full Venus”.

2. Has its phases

As Venus travels around the Sun inside the Earth’s orbit, it regularly changes from evening to morning sky and back again. She usually spends about 9 and a half months as an “evening star” and about the same time as a “morning star”.

Some ancient astronomers actually thought they were seeing two different celestial bodies. They named the morning star after Phosphorus, the harbinger of light, and the evening star for Hesperus, the son of Atlas. It was the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras who first realized that Phosphorus and Hesperus are one and the same object.

To the ancients, such behavior was puzzling and was not truly understood until the time of Galileo Galilei’s famous 17th-century astronomy. Moving to Pisa in the autumn of 1610, Galileo began observing Venus through his telescope. One evening he noticed that a small piece seemed to be missing from the disk of Venus.

A few months later, Venus appeared in the shape of a crescent – in other words, she seemed to showed the same behavior as the phases of the moon. It was a major discovery that ultimately helped deal the death blow to the long-standing concept of an Earth-centered universe.

1. Venus is Earth’s twin?

Earth and Venus are often referred to as planetary twins., and this is largely because they are very similar to the same substance. Both Earth and Venus are rocky planets, which means that they actually have the same density (which is not the case for Earth and, say, Neptune), and therefore they are also almost the same physical size.

They also have a significant atmosphere around their surfaces. However, their evolutionary paths since the early solar system have taken both planets on very different paths, despite all their similarities.