Of Popular Mechanics
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Venus may be dotted with active volcanoes, new research claims.
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Planetary scientists used data from the ancient Venus mission to create a series of computer simulations of Venetian volcanoes.
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NASA is already considering new missions to Venus; These findings could inspire Venus fever.
Venus is a strange and charming place. The rocky planet is often referred to as the Earth’s twin, because they are approximately the same size and approximately the same mass. But there are some notable differences.
To begin with, Venus drowns in a toxic atmosphere. Its surface can reach temperatures of up to 880 degrees Fahrenheit. And because it doesn’t have plate tectonics like Earth, scientists have long wondered if the planet was geologically active.
But now, astronomers have discovered strange ring-shaped features on the surface of Venus, called “crowns” after the Latin word for corona, indicating that the planet may be more active than previously thought.
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“People have suggested that Venus is volcanically active before,” said Anna Gülcher of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. New scientist. “What we have done that is new is to map these regions and correlate them with these specific sites.”
The scientists created a series of computer simulations that mapped out exactly how Venetian volcanoes would work and what they would look like. They compared the data from these simulations with data collected during the European Space Agency’s Venus Express mission and NASA’s Magellan mission.
The images collected during these missions featured various sites that coincided with what the computer simulations showed. In all, scientists identified 37 potentially active volcanic buildings in the Magellan data, collected between 1990 and 1994. Many were located around the equator of Venus, suggesting that the planet may have its own “Ring of Fire” and an interior warm and toasted. The team’s findings appear in the magazine. Nature Geoscience.
The researchers suspect that these strange features are formed similarly to some of the volcanoes found here on Earth. Molten magma probably creeps up from the planet’s warm mantle, sort of like the hot spot volcanoes that appear in places like Hawaii and Yellowstone. And these things are massive; The average size of each crown is approximately 186 miles wide. That’s more than twice the size of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa, the largest volcano on Earth.
There are many things the team doesn’t yet know, such as how recently volcanic crowns have been active. “It could be today or a couple of million years ago,” co-author and geologist Laurent GJ Montesi of the University of Maryland at College Park told CNN. The best way to answer these pressing questions and find out exactly what’s going on on the surface of Venus is to send a spaceship there.
So it’s good that in February NASA announced that it had selected four possible discovery missions to explore the far reaches of the solar system. Two of them, the DAVINCI + (Venus Deep Atmosphere Research of noble gases, Chemistry and Imaging Plus) and VERITAS (Emissivity of Venus, Radioscience, InSAR, Topography and Spectroscopy), are designed to study Venus. If these missions are selected, they could help shed light on the planet’s curious crowns.
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