Venus, the Planet: Introduction to the Evolution of Earth’s Sister Planet

Abstract

Venus is the planet in the Solar System most similar to Earth in terms of size and (probably) bulk composition. Until the mid-20th century, scientists thought that Venus was a verdant world—inspiring science-fictional stories of heroes battling megafauna in sprawling jungles. At the start of the Space Age, people learned that Venus actually has a hellish surface, baked by the greenhouse effect under a thick, CO2-rich atmosphere. In popular culture, Venus was demoted from a jungly playground to (at best) a metaphor for the redemptive potential of extreme adversity. However, whether Venus was much different in the past than it is today remains unknown. In this review, we show how now-popular models for the evolution of Venus mirror how the scientific understanding of modern Venus has changed over time. Billions of years ago, Venus could have had a clement surface with water oceans. Venus perhaps then underwent at least one dramatic transition in atmospheric, surface, and interior conditions before present day. This review kicks off a topical collection about all aspects of Venus’s evolution and how understanding Venus can teach us about other planets, including exoplanets. Here we provide the general background and motivation required to delve into the other manuscripts in this collection. Finally, we discuss how our ignorance about the evolution of Venus motivated the prioritization of new spacecraft missions that will rediscover Earth’s nearest planetary neighbor—beginning a new age of Venus exploration.

How Do Science Content Misconceptions Occur in Primary School Teachers with Teaching Certificates?

“…Scientifically, the hottest planet in the solar system is Venus (Devecioglu-Kaymakci, 2016;Akcanca & Özsevgeç, 2020;Song et al, 2022). Venus' massive, CO2-rich atmosphere creates a greenhouse effect that makes its surface the hottest in the Solar System on average (O'Rourke et al, 2023). Mercury is the closest planet to the sun, but it is not the hottest.…”

Estimates on the Possible Annual Seismicity of Venus

“…The reason for this was the observation of a relatively low number of craters with a near‐random spatial distribution on the surface (932 craters; Strom et al., 1994), from which people deduced a uniform, relatively young surface age of 240–800 Myr (Le Feuvre & Wieczorek, 2011; McKinnon et al., 1997). In these catastrophic or episodic resurfacing scenarios, Venus is currently in a relatively quiet tectonic phase after the geologically recent resurfacing event that led to the observed young surface age (O'Rourke et al., 2023; Rolf et al., 2022). However, the impact crater observations are also consistent with models in which volcanic and tectonic activity occurs at roughly constant rates over time (e.g., Herrick et al., 2023).…”

Meteors May Masquerade as Lightning in the Atmosphere of Venus

“…Venus's clouds are super‐rotating, moving westward much faster than the solid body (e.g., Read & Lebonnois, 2018). This attribute can be exploited for exploration: a surface station would take ∼243 Earth‐days to experience a sidereal day, but an aerial platform in the clouds could circumnavigate Venus at the equator every ∼5–7 Earth‐days (e.g., Cutts et al., 2022; O'Rourke et al., 2023). Likewise, many terrestrial exoplanets may have superrotating atmospheres (e.g., Imamura et al., 2020; Lee et al., 2020).…”