Venus might by no means have hosted oceans on its floor, based on new analysis.
Regardless of a scientific debate raging for years over the historical past of Venus and whether or not it ever held liquid oceans, new analysis by astrochemists from the College of Cambridge suggests it has all the time been dry.
“Two very different histories of water on Venus have been proposed: one where Venus had a temperate climate for billions of years with surface liquid water and the other where a hot early Venus was never able to condense surface liquid water,” mentioned the report’s authors Tereza Constantinou, Oliver Shorttle and Paul B. Rimmer.
Ms Constantinou and her colleagues modelled the present chemical make-up of Venus’ ambiance and found “the planet has never been liquid-water habitable”.
“Venus today is a hellish world,” suggests NASA. It has a mean floor temperature of round 465C (869F) and a strain 90 occasions better than Earth’s at sea degree, in addition to being completely shrouded in thick, poisonous clouds of sulfuric acid.
Of their examine, the scientists discovered the planet’s inside lacks hydrogen, which suggests it’s a lot drier than Earth’s inside.
As an alternative of condensing on the planet’s floor, any water in Venus’ ambiance doubtless remained as steam, suggests the analysis.
Again in 2016, a staff of scientists working for NASA’s Goddard Institute for House Research (GISS) in New York urged the planet might as soon as have been liveable.
The staff used a pc mannequin much like the sort used to foretell local weather change on Earth.
“Many of the same tools we use to model climate change on Earth can be adapted to study climates on other planets, both past and present,” mentioned Michael Means on the time, a researcher at GISS and the paper’s lead creator.
“These results show ancient Venus may have been a very different place than it is today.”
One other examine, by researchers on the College of Chicago final yr, urged that Venus “has been uninhabitable for over 70% of its history, four times longer than some previous estimates”.
