(ORDO NEWS) — Venus may be one of the brightest and most beautiful objects in our night sky, but don’t be fooled.
Our neighboring planet is extremely inhospitable to life as we know it, a poisonous, scorching world that humans can never set foot on.
However, despite the differences in habitability, Venus bears a striking resemblance to Earth.
Both planets are roughly the same size, mass and density, and have a very similar composition. This begs the question: Could Venus ever have been habitable?
If Venus ever had habitable conditions and liquid water on its surface, a new study has found, it was a long time ago and only lasted for a short while before the planet became the parched and arid world that it is. Today.
Planetologists Alexandra Warren and Edwin Kite of the University of Chicago modeled the history of Venus’s atmosphere to determine the rate and mechanisms of oxygen loss. – which, in turn, showed that if the planet ever had liquid water (which some scientists doubt), it was more than 3 billion years ago.
This is what Venus looks like now. It is very dry and there is very little oxygen. Its atmosphere is 96 percent carbon dioxide and 3 percent nitrogen, with trace amounts of other gases such as sulfur dioxide.
Its atmosphere is extremely dense, with over 90 times the pressure of Earth, and is eroded by powerful winds and sulfuric acid rain.
And because its atmosphere is so dense, the heat cannot escape. Venus has the highest surface temperature of any planet in the solar system, averaging 464 degrees Celsius (867 degrees Fahrenheit).
Earlier in the history of the solar system, when the Sun was less powerful, Venus might have been more temperate, with lakes and oceans of liquid water.
Planetary scientists want to know how and why Venus got to where it is today; because Venus is so similar to Earth some climate models suggest that Venus could have had water less than a billion years ago studying its history could help us figure out how likely our home planet is to follow the same path.
The lack of oxygen in Venus’s atmosphere is somewhat of a mystery. If the planet ever had a liquid ocean, that water would evaporate into the atmosphere as Venus warmed up, breaking down into hydrogen and oxygen through photodissociation, a chemical reaction caused by sunlight.
The hydrogen would have to evaporate. leaked into space, but the oxygen had to stay.
Warren and Kite wanted to know where that oxygen might have gone, so they built a model based on a habitable Venus.
They placed water oceans on the surface of Venus, added mechanisms that could contribute to the loss of oxygen, and tweaked parameters such as the amount of water and the time frame in which it could be present.
They allowed the Model to run 94,080 times, considering it successful if the levels of oxygen, water, and carbon monoxide at the end of the run were within the upper limits of these gases in Venus’s atmosphere today.
In the end, only a small percentage of model runs were successful, and they showed some interesting trends.
One possibility is that Venus’s oxygen bonded with carbon emitted by volcanoes to form carbon dioxide, but that seemed pretty likely unlikely.
Rather, oxygen is likely to suffer one of two fates: it will seep into space, or it will be sequestered in oxidizable magma, such as basalt, on the planet’s surface. And the oceans should have dried up no later than 3 billion years ago.
But the magnitude of past volcanic activity on Venus may be limited by the amount of radioactive argon still present in the planet’s atmosphere.
By determining how active Venus’s volcanism has been in the past, the researchers were able to estimate how much water might have been on the planet.
Answer: a little. The oceans of Venus may have been no more than 300 meters (984 feet) deep. This is less than 10 percent of the Earth’s average ocean depth of 3,688 meters.
Thus, the results reconcile the lack of oxygen in Venus’ current atmosphere with potential early habitable conditions, but the researchers say the loophole is narrow.
This loophole becomes even narrower when the argon entry is taken into account. Less than 0.4 percent of launches have been successful when taking into account the entire volume of Venus’ current atmosphere.
Future missions could try to measure the composition of Venus’s surface to determine if the planet has indeed entered the atmosphere. this is a very narrow loophole.
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