Today’s Venus is a hellish world with temperatures reaching 462 degrees Celsius at its surface and almost not water vapour, but for up to two billion years of its early history, the planet could have hosted life, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) study says.
Scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies conducted computer modeling of Venus’ ancient climate. They say the observations show the planet may have had a shallow water ocean and surface temperatures that would sustain life.
They published the results in the journal Geophysical Research Letters this week.
The NASA scientists propose that ancient Venus overall contained more dry land than Earth, particularly in the tropics. That would limit how much water evaporated from the ocean.
The study also proposed an ancient sun that was dimmer — up to 30 percent.
That’s not all the scientists believe could have made Venus habitable.
“In the GISS model’s simulation, Venus’ slow spin exposes its dayside to the sun for almost two months at a time,” said NASA scientist Anthony Del Genio, a co-author of the paper.
“This warms the surface and produces rain that creates a thick layer of clouds, which acts like an umbrella to shield the surface from much of the solar heating.”
“The result is mean climate temperatures that are actually a few degrees cooler than Earth’s today,” he continued.
“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,” said Michael Way, a NASA researcher and the lead author of the paper. “These results show ancient Venus may have been a very different place than it is today.”
What is the second closest planet to the sun like today? Try temperatures as high as 864 degrees fahrenheit on the surface. It has a carbon dioxide atmosphere that is 90 times thicker than Earth’s.
Results from NASA’s Pioneer mission to Venus in the 1980’s first demonstrated that the planet may have had an ocean. However, scientists speculate that because Venus receives a lot more sunlight than Earth, the ocean eventually evaporated, and ultraviolet radiation tore apart water-vapor molecules, allowing hydrogen to escape to space.
Scientists theorize with an absence of water on the surface, carbon dioxide increased in the atmosphere, which resulted in a “runaway greenhouse effect” that led to the planet’s current conditions.
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