As the sister planet of the earth, Fri. Love-hate relationships last when it comes to exploration. Now, new results indicate the presence of a signal Possible habitation on Venus, And long-forgotten siblings may find themselves in the spotlight again.
With its orbit close to that of the Sun, Venus clearly shone for the first ancient astronomers. As humanity began to explore the solar system, a world with the same mass and radius as the Earth seemed to be the most promising target. Fri. Sits on the border of our sun’s habitable zone, An area around the star, where a planet should be able to organize liquid water on its surface, and a reality is a two-planet idea in front of the eyes of scientists and people alike.
Related: Venus clouds join the shortlist of places to find alien life
More: The great secrets of Venus
“The idea of a temperate or forest-like atmosphere on the surface of Venus persisted until the mid-60s,” Stephen Kane, a planet-hunter at the University of California, Riverside, told SpaceDot via email. “He noted that”Journey to a prehistoric planetThe last Hollywood movie featuring astronauts visiting Venus came out in 1965, the same year that Soviet Venera 3 was bound to crash-land on Earth. Venus knows a very different atmosphere from scientists.
When NASA’s Mariner 5 flew through Venus in 1967, it declared a surface temperature of 860 degrees Fahrenheit (460 degrees Celsius). “The swamps evaporated digitally before their eyes,” Suzanne Smacker of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California told Space.com via email. Smacker is NASA’s chief investigator Notified the Veritas mission to Venus. (The name is abbreviated to Venus Amoebic, Radio Science, INSAR, Topography and Spectroscopy.)
Now not the hateful sister, our vision Venus became a hellish world With thick clouds, he had previously attracted a lot of attention in science fiction. Despite the surface being hot enough to melt lead, the planet was too crowded to host water on its surface. Its potential for life seemed to be evaporating from the swamp.
But as the fickle public turned their attention to the red world of Mars, scientists continued to study Earth’s twins. “We started working on trying to figure out how to remove the surface of Venus from previous thoughts so far,” Kane said.
In the last 50 years humans have tried to solve that riddle. Soviet Union Venera continued to send missions to Venus In the early 1980s, some would orbit the world and others would land on its surface. Blown up by NASA’s Viking and Pioneer missions, snapped photos and collected data going to the outer surface of the solar system.
In 1990, NASA’s Magellan mission established the surface of the planet and the location of the European Space Agency. Venus Express The world has been in orbit for eight long years studying its atmosphere. In 2015, Akatsuki Mission to Japan On Friday Venus began investigating the atmosphere which continues today. Meanwhile, the entire mission of the Solar System uses Venus regularly as the development of gravity for the distant world, taking a few brief observations on their past path.
Numerous observations, along with developments made to understand how the planets evolve, have presented a slowly changing picture of Venus. The results can help solve Questions about the evolution of life.
“Although many people believe that Venus has nothing to do with habitation due to the realization of the hellish conditions of Venus during the 60’s, we have since changed our perspective to understand what Venus has. Everything To do with living, ”Kane said.
The future of the earth, the past of the earth
During the early stages of research, scientists quickly realized that Venus was suffering from a serious case of receptivity. Greenhouse effect. The Earth’s thick atmosphere acted as a blanket to trap heat, raising temperatures to unbearable extremes.
“A lot of people assumed that Venus was a‘ solved problem ’, where the view of the fugitive greenhouse was filled and that was the end of the story,” Kane said. “However, we now realize that this is just the beginning.”
The conditions that once led scientists to doubt Venus could not have changed to a world like Earth. Both planets appear to have the same origin: a world large enough to hold atmospheric spaces with mature initial conditions to collect water on the surface. So where did Venus go wrong?
It is a question that still bothers Venus researchers as they determine the conditions that lead to habitat and excessive destruction. Nearby is the question of whether the atmosphere of Venus has changed dramatically in a single catastrophe or whether it has changed slowly over time.
Ongoing observations have also revealed that Venus is nothing but inactive. Surface low-resolution radar images have shown evidence of this Recent explosive volcanoes, In the last 100 million years. If our two planets continue to invert gases into the air through its peaks, it would argue for a slower shift in the atmosphere than a catastrophe.
These questions are particularly relevant for the Earth, where man-made greenhouse gases are constantly growing in the atmosphere. Some people point to Venus as a sign of the future of the planet if human behavior does not change.
But the planet next door Just can’t show our future, It can also show our past. According to Smereker, Venus is the only place in the Solar System that can have continents and extremities, the first step in kicking plate tectonics. Despite the clearly long list of missions that visited the planet, our view of the surface remains very short. If Venus has continents, planetary scientists want to know when and how to form them, which could help researchers better understand the early Earth.
“The system of the Earth’s continents and plate tectonics has shaped the evolution of the Earth’s climate and habitat,” Smecker said. “But they came into existence billions of years ago; little data of that time remains.”
It is also possible that it was Venus, not Earth, where life first appeared in the solar system. According to Smacker, our twin planets have many of the characteristics needed for habitable worlds – volcanoes, tectonics, surface weather, and the potential geological engine to drive past oceans. “Even today its surface seems the most hospitable, it may be the first habitable planet in the past,” he said.
Side exoplanet
As the number of known exoplanets dwindles into the thousands, Venus may be the key to unlocking and understanding which of these worlds is habitable. The planets around other stars are viewed from incredible distances, and it is possible that humans will step on any of them in the near future. But from a distance, the potentially habitable exo-Earth looks just like Exo-Venus.
“Venus and Earth are identical if viewed as exoplanets,” Smacker said. “Yet they are completely different today.”
In 2015, Kane “Venus Zone“The area around a star where a planet’s atmosphere can turn into a greenhouse world. At the time, he said, he wanted to emphasize the shape alone, which is one of the primary ways to describe the world as” Earth-like, “not enough to indicate habitat.
In order to sort of hellish worlds like Venus, one needs to know that Venus created Venus in the planet nowadays. “The key to understanding the habitation of the planets and how they evolved over time lies in understanding the evolution of our sister planet,” Kane said.
That’s one reason why scientists like Smacker and Kane advocate a second mission to Venus. Further research could discover signs of the existence of water relatively recently on the surface, which could indicate that the planet is slowly losing its habitable state instead of rapidly becoming a victim of destruction.
“To answer many of the remaining questions, we must return to Venus, especially when Venus lost its liquid water,” Kane said.
Kane added that Venus could help give a better understanding of the evolution of life in other worlds compared to other non-Earth terrestrial planets in the Solar System.
“In the context of exoplanets, the subject of habitation will not always be Mars-sized but Earth and Venus-sized planets,” Kane said. “In order to find life in the universe, it is necessary to understand the incredible Venus-Earth understanding.”
New results
After decades of neglect, Venus will soon take center stage.
New results, Released on Monday (Sept. 14), reveals the presence of a potential biological sign that could come from life hidden in the planet’s clouds. Earth’s twin clouds have long been considered a Potential home for life, But the discovery of phosphine, a flammable gas that can come to Earth from the breakdown of organic matter, gives the issue a new impetus.
“Biology in the atmosphere may be the remaining members of the previous spermatogenesis,” Kane said. “If the clouds are confirmed to be the result of life, this result will be an extraordinary lesson in how life can truly adapt to all available resources within an environment.”
But Kane gave a few warnings for that conclusion. If life is currently living in the clouds of Venus, it must have found a way to continue to prolong the atmosphere instead of returning to Earth’s surface, which it calls a “difficult problem to solve.” When life has been discovered in the clouds of the earth, that material has been lifted upwards from the surface by convection, as warmer and less ganse material has moved upwards. That method does not exist on Venus, Kane said.
In addition, Venus’s atmosphere is hot, dry, and surrounded by vast reservoirs of sulfuric acid, all of which can make life difficult for the past billions of years, from the time the surface once planned life, Kane said. And new research is based on the production of phosphine on Earth, while the surface and atmosphere of Venus are significantly different.
Smerer agreed.
He thinks the new results highlight the need to explore active and recent volcanoes. While the authors rejected the active volcano as an explanation of their investigation, she pointed out that it is difficult to observe the process on Venus, where signs of lava may disappear in days or weeks. Understanding the chemistry of the surface and the processes that volcanoes produce is key to interpreting the new research, which is said to be “interesting and highlights the need to better understand our sister planet.”
For Kane, the new results obscure the need to return to Earth twins in the near future.
“Since the claim has been made and we do not currently have a good understanding of the observations, it is our responsibility to investigate further and determine what the actual source of the phosphine is.” He pointed to upcoming missions, including Veritas, which will help scientists understand the planet’s atmosphere and geology.
“Only through this type of mission will we be able to answer this question of potential life in the clouds on Friday,” Kane said.
Follow Nola on Facebook and Twitter at olaNolaTRedd. Follow us On Twitter @speed.com and Facebook.
