betsymccall.net Lifelong Learning Astronomy Planets Venus

Venus is the second planet from the sun (however you define planet), and is sometimes thought of as Earth's twin, since it's nearly the same size, mass and composition as the Earth, although it has no moon. Venus is also thought of as an object lesson for the Earth as to what can happen when the greenhouse effect runs away. This will happen to us eventually, as the sun continues to warm, but not for a while yet (at least not to the point where the planet is utterly uninhabitable). Venus does, however, provide another case study, both for the greenhouse effect, as well as plate tectonics (or maybe some alternative geological scheme).

The proper adjective for describing things about Venus is "Venerean" or "Veneran" if you use the correct Latin form. (Recall, the Venera spacecraft?) However, scientists being sex-obsessed little boys thought that sounded too much like "venereal" and we can't have that, so they replaced it with the ugly (and linguistically incorrect) "Venutian" or "Venusian". I stick with the correct adjective because I don't think about sex every seven seconds.

In ancient times, Venus, as the morning star, was also referred to in Latin as Lucifer, which means "bearer of light", since it rose before the sun.

I recently took a course on the geophysics of Venus, and for the end of the course we had to do a little lightning talk, and a poster in Thing Explainer format.

Venus vs. Io Volcanoes poster (pdf)

Volcanism on Venus vs. Io presentation (pdf)

Some interesting things that struck me during the course that I'd like to maybe return to one day is 1) the consequences of turbulent convection in the mantel, and 2) the overturning of the surface that some think happened to Venus about 500 million years ago. It's the latter that led me to compare to volcanism on Io and volcanism on Venus. They don't have a lot in common right now (for instance, there are very few shield volcanoes in Io, but lots on Venus), but when I think about a catastrophic overturning of the surface, I think immediately of Io. As I get more into computer modeling, it might be interesting to see what conditions would be necessary on Venus to produce the kind of extreme volcanism we see on Io even briefly, and what that might look like.

Links:

Venus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Venus (mythology) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

NASA - Venus

Venus Introduction

Solar System Exploration: Planets: Venus

NSSDC Photo Gallery: Venus

Planet Venus

Image Results for Venus

Venus, Planet Venus

Venus (NinePlanets.org)

Planet Venus - Overview & Pictures