Throughout history, Venus has been one of the planets that many civilizations have recognized. Named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty, she was also known to the Greeks as Aphrodite. All the planets in our solar system are named after male gods or mythological creatures, with the exception of Venus.
This is the only planet named after a woman, and it is believed that this is because she is the brightest planet.
At one time, some astronomers in the past thought that Venus was actually two stars. This was due to the fact that she appeared as a morning and evening star.
Since its glow is so bright, astronomers have suggested that the planet itself should be beautiful. However, as soon as space exploration began, scientists realized that there was a terrible environment on the planet.
Many missions were sent to Venus, but it is almost impossible to get to the surface of the planet due to its extremely high temperatures.
Without further ado, here are 10 interesting facts about Venus for children, the information is suitable for a report.
10. Volcanoes, lava and plateaus
Along with intense tectonic activity, Venus has undergone many volcanic eruptions. The biggest consequences are the huge lava fields that cover most of the hilly plains. They are much like the fields of overlapping lava flows that can be seen on other planets, including the Earth, but they are much more extensive.
The individual streams are mostly long and thin, which indicates that the erupting lavas were very fluid and, therefore, could flow over long distances on gentle slopes.
9. No water or similar substance
When astronomers first sent their rudimentary telescopes to Venus, they saw a world shrouded in clouds. Here on Earth, clouds mean water, so early astronomers imagined a tropical world with constant rainfall.
The truth, of course, is that the dense atmosphere on Venus almost entirely consists of carbon dioxide. In fact, the atmospheric pressure on the surface of Venus exceeds the Earth's as much as 92 times.
There is no water on the surface of Venus, in the form of rivers, lakes or oceans. The average temperature on Venus is 461.85 C. Since water boils at 100 C, it simply cannot be on the surface.
8. The hottest planet in the solar system
Venus is the second planet from the Sun and has a temperature that is maintained at 462 degrees Celsius, regardless of where you are heading. This is the hottest planet in the solar system..
So what makes Venus hotter than Mercury? Mercury has no atmosphere, and the atmosphere, as we know, can retain heat. Any heat that Mercury receives from the Sun is quickly lost in space.
Venus is almost identical in size to the Earth, and its viewing was difficult due to the very dense atmosphere of carbon dioxide. This dense atmosphere makes the surface of Venus hotter because the heat does not go back into space.
The atmosphere on Venus is so strong that the pressure will be ninety-two times greater than what you experience while standing on the beach at sea level.
7. Dense impenetrable atmosphere
The atmosphere of Venus is so hot and dense that you would not have survived a visit to the planet - you could not breathe air, you would be crushed by the enormous weight of the atmosphere, and you would burn out at surface temperatures high enough to melt the lead.
The atmosphere of Venus consists mainly of carbon dioxide, and clouds of sulfuric acid completely cover the planet. The atmosphere captures a small amount of solar energy that reaches the surface along with the heat that the planet itself emits.
This greenhouse effect has made the surface and lower atmosphere of Venus one of the hottest places in the solar system!
6. Sulfur Rains
The atmosphere of Venus supports opaque clouds of sulfuric acid ranging in length from 50 to 70 km. A layer of fog seeps under the clouds up to about 30 km, and below it is clear. Over a dense layer of CO2 are thick clouds, which are mainly composed of sulfur oxide and drops of sulfuric acid.
The fact is that there is no precipitation on the surface of Venus - while sulfate rains fall in the upper atmosphereThey evaporate before reaching the surface for about 25 km.
In addition, the concentration of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere, which decreased by 10 times between 1978 and 1986, indicates that sulfur in the atmosphere actually occurs as a result of volcanic eruptions.
5. Rotates counterclockwise
Venus is in many ways an eccentric. For example, it spins in the opposite direction from most other planets, including Earth, so that on Venus the sun rises in the west.
Scientists are still puzzled reverse, or retrograde, rotation of Venus. A team of scientists from the French research institute Astronomie et Systemes Dynamiques has proposed a new explanation. This theory claims that Venus initially rotated in the same direction as most other planets, and, in a sense, still does it: at some point, it simply turned its axis 180 degrees.
In other words, it rotates in the same direction as always, only upside down, so that when viewed from other planets from other planets, the rotation seems to be reversed.
4. Day and year on the planet
On our planet, starry days last 23 hours 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds, while a sunny day lasts exactly 24 hours. In the case of Venus, for the planet to rotate once around its own axis, a whopping 243.025 days are required, which is the longest period of revolution of any planet in the solar system. Besides, about 224.7 Earth days per revolution around the Sun.
3. The brightest after the sun and moon
In good weather, Venus is the first planet that observers of the night sky on the planet can see, and this can be seen even before sunset, if you know exactly where to look in the south-western sky.
The planet is gaining height at dusk, boldly showing itself after six months of hiding behind any uncomfortable obstacles near the southwest horizon.
The dazzling brightness of Venus is the result of cosmic geometry. As the planet moves around the Sun, observers on Earth can see it illuminated from all sides. This causes Venus to go through “phases” like the Moon.
When Venus is on the opposite side of the Sun in relation to the Earth, at a point called “excellent conjunction”, it is fully illuminated, and we see it as “full Venus”.
2. Has its phases
Since Venus travels around the Sun inside the Earth’s orbit, it regularly changes from evening to morning sky and vice versa. Usually she spends about 9 and a half months as an “evening star” and about the same amount of time as a “morning star”.
Some ancient astronomers really thought they saw two different celestial bodies. They named the morning star after Phosphorus, the harbinger of light, and the evening star for Hesperus, son of Atlas. It was the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras who first realized that Phosphorus and Hesperus are one and the same object.
For the ancients, this behavior was mysterious and was not really understood until the time of the famous 17th-century astronomy Galileo Galilei. Having moved to Pisa in the fall of 1610, Galileo began to observe Venus through his telescope. One evening, he noticed that a small piece seemed to be missing from the disk of Venus.
A few months later, Venus appeared in the shape of a crescent - in other words, she seemed to showed the same behavior as the phases of the moon. This was a major discovery that ultimately helped deliver a mortal blow to the long-held Earth-centered concept of the universe.
1. Venus - the twin of the Earth?
Earth and Venus are often called planetary twins., and this is largely because they are very similar to the same substance. Both Earth and Venus are rocky planets, which means that they actually have the same density (which cannot be said about Earth and, say, Neptune), and therefore they also have almost the same physical size.
They also have a significant atmosphere around their surfaces. However, their evolutionary paths since the early solar system brought both planets to completely different paths, despite all their similarities.