100 Interesting Facts About Venus | Mental Floss

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Did you know that a day on Venus lasts longer than a year? A Venusian year, at least. It
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takes 243 Earth days for Venus to complete a single rotation on its axis. It revolves
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around the Sun in about 225 Earth days. The idea of spending an entire year on a Monday
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is… extremely depressing. Hi, I'm Erin McCarthy. Welcome to The List Show. Venus is, in some ways, the most similar
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planet in the Solar System to our own humble planetary abode. But in other ways, it's
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practically bizarro Earth. I'm going to cover some of the strangest and most fascinating facts about our neighbor
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from its backwards rotation to its split personality. Let's get started
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Venus has been called Earth's evil twin, and that's not because, as I had assumed
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it looks exactly like Earth but has a mustache. It's because, despite a similar size and
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density to Earth, and a possible past history of being hospitable to life, Venus is now
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extremely unwelcoming to any human beings interested in water sports and or living
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Its surface temperature of around 470 degrees Celsius is hot enough to melt lead. Its atmosphere
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is mostly composed of the gas carbon dioxide. Some people actually look at the planet as
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a worst-case scenario for the destructive feedback loop caused by the greenhouse effect
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All that greenhouse gas helps explain why Venus is hotter than Mercury, despite being
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30 million miles farther away from the Sun. And you won't get much of a break from the
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Venusian winter. Because the planet tilts only about 3 degrees off vertical compared
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to Earth's 23 degrees, there aren't really any meaningful seasonal differences on Venus
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Even if you could somehow survive the temperature and noxious air, the pressure would probably
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get to you. Atmospheric pressure is about 90 times higher on Venus than on the surface
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of the Earth. All those factors add up to a less-than-appealing vacation getaway, but
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I can't say we're sure there's no life around. Though it's a pretty safe bet that
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Venus' surface is barren, there are scientists who believe the dense clouds covering the
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planet could harbor microbial life. Those clouds, incidentally, are primarily made up
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of sulfuric acid, which is poisonous to humans. Around 50 to 70 kilometers above the surface, temperatures and atmospheric pressure reach
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levels closer to those found on Earth's surface. That led Soviet engineer Sergei Shetomirsky
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to speculate, back in 1971, that human beings might one day be able to survive on manned
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dirigibles in a habitable sweet spot in Venus' atmosphere. Years later, American aerospace engineer Jeffrey Landis proposed a similar idea for aerostat
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habitats that could create floating living spaces for humans around 50 kilometers above
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the surface of the planet. Landis thought that the regular air we breathe on Earth would have a lifting effect on Venus
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As he said, if the settlement is contained in an envelope containing oxygen and nitrogen
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the size of a modest city, the amount of mass which can be lifted will be, in fact, large
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enough that it could also hold the mass of a modest city. I don't know if that's true, but I want it to be
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estate prices in the floating Venus city would definitely be more reasonable than New York
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Of course, the toxic clouds found in the atmosphere would prove challenging for any Earthlings
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making the move to Venus. But some scientists think those clouds might already be a home
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for life. The chemical compound phosphine, which some scientists consider a potential
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biosignature indicating the presence of anaerobic life, might have been detected in those clouds
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Not all experts are convinced. And even if phosphine was definitely detected, it doesn't
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necessarily guarantee the presence of life, but it may be enough to spur more research
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Venus has some unique distinctions. For one, it's the only planet in the solar system
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named after a female deity, Rome's goddess of love and beauty. The ancient Babylonians
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associated it with Ishtar, the goddess of fertility, love, and war. Ishtar's predecessor
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may have been the Sumerian Inanna, who was also associated with the planet. The theologian
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and historian Jeffrey L. Cooley argued that elements of Inanna's story are directly informed
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by the astronomical behavior of Venus. The story of her descent into the Underworld
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for example, at least in part describes the setting of the planet Venus in the west, followed
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by her eventual rising in the east. Venus is one of only two planets in the solar system
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that rotate backwards relative to the rest. Scientists aren't sure why that is, but
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some have posited that an impact with a planet-sized object billions of years ago got the planet
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spinning this way. Another way Venus is a bit eccentric is its lack of eccentricity—orbital eccentricity
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is, which is a way of measuring how far from a perfect circle a planet's elliptical orbit is
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Venus's orbital eccentricity of 0.007 means it nearly travels a perfect circle around the Sun
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If you know which planet travels the second least eccentric path around the Sun, drop it in the comments below. It is not intuitive. Venus is usually the brightest
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planet in the night sky for us Earthlings. And that's not just because it's relatively close to
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us. Its albedo, essentially how much sunlight it reflects, is around 0.7, indicating that about 70
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percent of the sunlight that strikes it gets reflected back. Surprising side note, for me at
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least. What percentage of light that hits the Moon do you think gets reflected back
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It usually looks pretty bright in the night sky, but the answer is actually only about 10 percent
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The Moon's apparent brightness is more a function of its proximity to us than the reflectivity of its
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dark surface. Venus's brightness, perceived and absolute, helped earn it two erroneous but
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revealing nicknames—the morning star and the evening star. It's not actually a star, of course
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but depending on where it is in its celestial journey, it can look like the first star in the
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early evening or the last star to remain visible before the sun rises. A number of ancient cultures
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actually thought Venus was two different astronomical bodies. Homer seemed to think this
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as did the later Greeks, who would sometimes call them Phosphorus and Hesperus, corresponding to the
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Morning Star and Evening Star, or literally something like the bringer of light and the
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star of the evening This ancient misconception led to a famous semantic puzzle from Gottlob Frege to the extent that any semantic puzzles are famous I guess Phosphorus and Hesperus ultimately refer to the same entity Venus And yet saying Hesperus equals Hesperus doesn
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seem to be the same type of statement as Hesperus equals Phosphorus. The first one is self-evident
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while the second could be taken to represent a new discovery in astronomy—a discovery
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that actually happened at some point in human history, when people realize both stars are
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actually the same celestial body. So are the two sentences the same? And if not, what does
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that mean? At the heart of Frege's puzzle are questions about identity statements and
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the nature of language and knowledge. According to Frege, the meaning of phosphorus is not
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as we might initially assume, completely contained by the physical entity it refers to, Venus
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I would discuss this puzzle further, but ytic philosophy gives Erin and the editor-in-chief
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of mentalfloss.com a headache. But that's just us. The mathematician and noted triangle enthusiast Pythagoras is often credited as the first person
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in Greece to have documented the realization that the Morning Star and the Evening Star
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were the same celestial body. Later, the Greeks borrowed the Babylonian names for the planets and adapted them to their
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own deities. So Ishtar became Aphrodite. From there, it was just a hop, skip, and a jump over to Rome, where Aphrodite became Venus
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Because Venus is often visible to the naked eye, it's impossible to say who discovered it
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wasn't discovered at all, in any traditional sense of the word. But that didn't stop the
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writer Immanuel Velikovsky from setting forth a fantastical version of events in the middle
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of the 20th century, suggesting that Venus was born as a comet in the second millennium
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before the present era. He tried to substantiate this creative history with references to ancient
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religious texts and folklore. His book, Worlds in Collision, quickly became a bestseller
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but its legacy today is as an exemplar of pseudoscience. Sometimes Venus is visible in the daytime, and it's been spotted by some pretty notable
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historical figures. On March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was being inaugurated for his second term
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when people started noticing a bright object in the sky. Even Abe was soon looking upwards
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As one of his bodyguards described it, "...there in plain view, shining out in all her star-like
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beauty, was the planet Venus." Napoleon Bonaparte was present for another one of Venus's daytime
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appearances. He was at an event and reportedly wondered why the crowd was paying more attention
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to the sky than to him, as the Data Book of Astronomy put it. What a narcissist
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Shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, U.S. ships were traveling on open seas when
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someone saw an object in the sky believed to be a plane. As Lanson B. Ditto, who was aboard the USS
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Langley, later told the National Museum of Pacific War, "...we opened fire at what we thought was the
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altitude of the plane. Pretty soon, word came down from the navigator, it turned out that we had fired
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300 rounds at the planet Venus. People have often confused Venus for a UFO. Back in 1969
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Jimmy Carter might have done so. This was in Georgia, a few years before Carter became president
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And to be clear, he never said he thought the object was an alien spacecraft. But Carter wasn't
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convinced by a popular explanation for his sighting—that it was Venus, then at its near maximum
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brightness in the sky. The whole incident actually inspired him to make a pledge on the 1976 campaign
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trail that, if elected, he would make every piece of information about UFOs public knowledge
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Venus is one of only two planets that cross in front of the sun from our point of view here on
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Earth. In Venus's case, these passages, known as transits, are rare. They've been observed eight
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times since telescopes were invented in the early 1600s. If you're hoping to see one after watching
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this video, hopefully you're one of our younger viewers. The next transit will happen in 2117
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I've mostly talked about how odd Venus is, but in some ways, it's a lot like Earth
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Its mass is about 81% of our planets, and its radius is only a couple of percentage
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points smaller. That similar mass also means that Venus's gravity is pretty close to ours
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A 200-pound person would weigh about 182 pounds on Venus—you know, if it wasn't for the
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immediately burning to death thing. Venus is, at times, the closest planet to Earth
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Depending on where the two neighbors are in their respective orbits, it can be as close is 26 million miles away from us, or as far as 162 million miles. To put that in perspective
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the Moon is only about 239,000 miles from Earth, on average. You heard it here first. Space is big
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Now, it's often said that Venus is the closest planet to Earth, but that depends on how you
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define closest. In 2019, some scientists writing in Physics Today concluded that Mercury is, on
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average, closer to Earth than Venus, even though Venus sometimes swoops in to take the absolute
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closest crown. It takes about 6 minutes for light from the Sun to reach Venus, compared
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to a little over 8 minutes for Earth. The composition of Earth and Venus are probably
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pretty similar, with an iron core, a rocky mantle, and an exterior crust
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Evidence suggests that people have been charting the path of Venus for millennia. The Venus
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Tablet of Amisaduga from Babylonia may be one such example. It likely dates all the way
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back to the mid-17th century BCE, though only later copies of the original record seem to
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have survived. The Maya also charted Venus' movements. Some scholars believe it had a
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special place in the culture's mythology. A document from the 1500s CE associates the
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eight-day period in between Venus' appearance as the Morning Star and Evening Star with
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the death and resurrection of the deity Quetzalcoatl. Alchemists during the Middle Ages reportedly
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associated the planet Venus with copper. I don't know what that means exactly, but also
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we're talking about alchemy, so I'm open to the answer being a bunch of pseudoscientific nonsense
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In the early 17th century CE, Galileo used his telescope to observe Venus. He noticed
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that it appears to have phases—not unlike the Moon—in which more or less of the planet
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is visible to us on Earth The particular variety of phases he observed wasn explainable under the prevailing geocentric understanding of the universe This insight helped support the idea that Venus orbits the Sun and not the Earth as many believed at the time The cycle of phases for Venus by the way
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takes 584 days to complete—a bit longer than the lunar cycle of around a month
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William Blake's To the Evening Star is an ode to Venus, as is Wordsworth's To the Planet Venus
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The planet may also appear in Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night. Art historian Albert Boehme once
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yzed the available information about its creation to map the painting onto the night sky
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as seen from Van Gogh's window at the St. Paul Asylum. Buime identified one particular star as
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Venus, which may be supported by a letter Van Gogh sent to his brother Theo, around the same time
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This morning I saw the countryside from my window, a long time before sunrise
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the troubled artist wrote, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big
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A period of somewhat fanciful speculation in regards to Venus may have been spurred
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on by Percival Lowell's studies of Mars. In the late 1800s, Lowell thought he had confirmed
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the existence of cs on the surface of Mars, which would have been compelling evidence for
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intelligent life there. Lowell's conclusions, though soon discredited, helped inspire a general
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interest in the possibility of life on other planets. Soon enough, Venus emerged as a possible
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home of extraterrestrial life. In the early 20th century, we had limited data about conditions on
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the planet. Its dense cloud covering meant that just about anything could theoretically be going
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on down at the surface. The Swedish Nobel Prize winner Svante Arrhenius didn't think life was
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likely to be found on other planets, but made an exception for Venus, which he thought could
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harbor plants and some animals. Charles Greeley Abbott, the director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical
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Observatory, went even further in the 1920s. He thought Venus was likely to have abundant moisture
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at almost identical temperatures to ours, and thought intelligent life might live there
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Discoveries made in the coming years made those hypotheses increasingly unlikely. In the 1930s
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scientists failed to detect oxygen on the planet. By 1940, it became clear that carbon dioxide
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dominated the atmosphere instead. Let's back up to the late 1800s again for a quick side note about
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Lowell. Not unlike his imaginary Martian cs, Lowell thought he had observed a spoke-like
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pattern on the surface of Venus. This kind of unnatural topography could, if proven, be interpreted
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as evidence for intelligent life. But it didn't take long for Lowell's spokes to be dismissed as
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as an illusion by his contemporaries, often with extreme prejudice. One bit of interplanetary shade came from the astronomer Eugene Antoniotti, who said
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that people like Lowell, forgetting that Venus is decently clad in a dense atmospheric mantle
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cover what they called the surface of the unfortunate planet with a fashionable c network
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Even Lowell's second-in-command once wrote a letter to Lowell's own brother-in-law, saying of his embattled boss, I fear it will not be possible to turn him into a scientific man
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In response, Lowell fired him. him. But it wasn't until the 21st century that an amazing explanation for Lowell's
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supposed spokes was widely discussed. The businessman-kama astronomer often used extreme levels of magnification and stopped down the aperture of his telescope, so that the instrument's
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exit people was extremely narrow. This effectively turned his giant telescope into an ophthalmoloscope
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Lowell's spokes may very well have been the shadow of the blood vessels in his own
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eye. When you go to the eye doctor, do you ever ask them to look at the inside of your
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eye because I do. Well into the 20th century, though, Venus persisted as a popular destination
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for sci-fi writers. Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Edgar Rice Burroughs all wrote fiction set on
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the planet. And in the second half of that century, humans started sending space vehicles to Venus
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In 1962, the planet became the first destination for a successful interplanetary spacecraft
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Sort of. The Mariner 2 space probe actually flew past the planet at a range of about 22,000 miles
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With onboard tools like microwave radiometer and a solar plasma spectrometer, Mariner 2 provided
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insights into Venus's temperature and cloud layer, amongst other things. In 1966, the Soviet Union's
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Venera 3 became the first man-made spacecraft to land on another planet's surface. It was a crash
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landing, though, and Venera 3 failed to transmit any data back to Earth from the surface of the
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planet. Venera 4 is the mission that revealed how carbon dioxide-heavy the atmosphere on Venus is
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And in 1970, Vanera 7 saw the first soft landing of a spacecraft on another planet—relatively
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soft, at least. As the probe descended to the surface, its parachute ripped, leading to a
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harsher impact than planned. Vanera 7 was able to send data back to Earth from the surface of Venus
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albeit with a weak signal, for 23 minutes after landing. In 1975, Vanera's 9 and 10 transmitted
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the first-ever images from the surface of another planet. These inspiring testaments to human
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ingenuity and perseverance look kind of like a bunch of blurry rocks. 1982 saw lucky Venerys 13
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and 14. Or maybe I should say heard them. These were the first missions to transmit sounds from
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another planet. Check it out. Venerys 13 also led to an amazing story of dashed optimism
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Leonid Kassan-Famolidi, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, looked at photos from Venerys
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13 and saw a disc, a black flap, and a scorpion, which he thought seemed to move around in different
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photos. As he said, let's boldly suggest that the object's morphological features would allow us to
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say that they are living. Once other experts looked closely at the images, though, they weren't ready
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to say anything of the sort. Some of the anomalies could be explained as digital artifacts, only found
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in lower-quality versions of the images. And one of the other theoretical alien lifeforms was
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identified as most likely to be a lens cap. Percival Lowell would be proud
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The Soviet missions remain the only ones, to this day, to have landed on the planet's
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surface. That may be why Dmitry Raskozen of the Russian space corporation Roscosmos said
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back in 2020 we think that Venus is a Russian planet The dense cloud coverage and difficulty of exploring Venus surface leaves a lot of unanswered questions We know that Venus has more volcanoes
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than any other planet in the solar system, for example, but we don't know whether there are any
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active volcanoes. Recent studies suggest that there are, but we won't know definitively until
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another mission can confirm it. There's debate as to whether lightning occurs on Venus
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As associate professor Karen Applin told EOS, I think probably the best evidence at the moment suggests there's probably not lightning at Venus
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But if there is, it's a bit weird and we don't quite understand it. The mysteries of Venus also gave rise to one of my favorite quotations we've stumbled upon
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in researching a video. In 2020, an ysis of atmospheric data revealed that nitrogen levels
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in some parts of Venus' atmosphere may be much higher than previously thought
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In response, MIT's Clara Sousa Silva said, I naively thought we knew the atmosphere quite well. We know f**k all about Venus
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Tell us how you really feel, Dr. Sousa Silva. We do know some things about Venus, of course. Hopefully, at least 23 more things
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Venus has no moons. It's the second planet from the Sun. Cut me some slack. This video
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has 100 facts and I need a couple of gimmies. The tallest mountain range on Venus is Maxwell
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Montes, which is not, I can confirm, the name of an R&B singer from the 90s. Its highest point
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is 36,000 feet, making it taller than Mount Everest. Given its altitude, the mountain's
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peak is the coldest point on the surface of Venus, at a chilly 716 degrees Fahrenheit
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Maxwell Montes is named after the British scientist James Maxwell, making it the only
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physical feature on the planet to be explicitly named after a man. Two features are named
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Alpha Reggio and Beta Reggio—not in honor of anyone at all. All the rest, according to
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convention established by the International Astronomical Union Convention, are named after female figures, both real and mythological, or the name of the planet itself in various
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languages. That wasn't always the case, though, which led to a bit of a kerfuffle back in 1980
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Originally, the plan was to name all of Venus' features after mythological figures
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Advocacy groups like the National Organization for Women argued that this ignored actual women
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and let the IAU know about it. A compromise was struck. Now there are features on the planet named
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after goddesses from a number of different cultures around the world, alongside other
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features named for real historical figures, including the poet Sappho, the explorer Sacagawea
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and the physicist Lisa Meitner. Even though Venus looks white in the night sky, it has a tiny bit of
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a yellow tinge to it. To be clear, though, it doesn't look like this image put out by NASA
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That's actually a false color image made by translating parts of the electromagnetic spectrum
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which we can't actually see, into a visible image of the planet's surface beneath the clouds
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The color was chosen by NASA, based on images from Venera. It probably didn't hurt that the
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color cast fits the rather hellish personality of the Venusian surface. Or should I say
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the venerean surface? If we follow the conventions of Latin from which Venus gets its name
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the adjectival form would be venerean, which is still considered acceptable today
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And, as Neil deGrasse Tyson pointed out on Twitter, if there was a living being on Venus
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instead of calling them a venusian, the term that tends to dominate today
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Latin conventions would dictate we refer to them as venereal. You can probably guess why
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that didn't catch on. We don't know for sure whether ancient venerials would have taken a dip
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in venerian oceans. For years, scientists have debated whether the planet might have once been
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more hospitable to life—perhaps even covered in liquid water. A 2021 piece published in Nature
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suggests it isn't likely, though. According to the climate modeling researchers did
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temperatures on Venus would have never been low enough to sustain liquid water
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As one of the co-authors of the paper acknowledged, though, we will not be able to rule on the matter
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definitively on our computers. The observations of the three future Venusian space missions will
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be essential to confirm or refute our work. Those space missions, which I'll get to more in a sec
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were very much in doubt as recently as 2017. That's the year journalist, author, and occasional
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Mental Floss contributor David Brown wrote a piece in The Atlantic, wondering why NASA was
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neglecting Venus. With much of the energy and space exploration centered around the search for
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life, Brown felt that Venus was increasingly taking a backseat to destinations like Mars
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and Jupiter's moon, Europa. With the most recent NASA-led mission to Venus's atmosphere
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dating all the way back to 1978's Pioneer Venus II, some experts felt institutional
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knowledge of the planet was in danger of disappearing. As Ellen Stofan, NASA's former chief scientist
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said, My huge concern is that the expertise is still there, but it's going away. If we
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have no Venus missions, it will definitely be gone. We will have lost something
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Sofan got some good news in 2021, when NASA announced not one but two missions to study
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Venus as part of its Discovery Program competition. Dubbed Da Vinci Plus and Veritas, they're
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scheduled to launch around the end of this decade. Among the questions the two missions hope to answer are whether or not the planet ever had an ocean, what types of rock make
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up its surface, and whether there are active volcanoes on the planet. The European Space
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Agency, meanwhile, greenlit a mission called Envision—not the name of a boy band, sadly
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Among other things, Envision will seek more insight into how our neighboring planet evolved
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to be so vastly different from Earth, despite some of the similarities between the two planets
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that we noted earlier. One of the reasons Venus has re-emerged as a priority in space exploration is the abundance
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of similarly-sized exoplanets astronomers have discovered. As planetary geologist Martha Gilmour said, the exoplanet folks and the Venus folks have
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become like BFFs because we're trying to understand how an Earth-sized planet happens
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Gotta love some cross-disciplinary scientific friendship

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