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Size comparison of Venus and Earth. Credit: NASA/JPL/Magellan Venus is only slightly smaller than the Earth, and so has enjoyed billions of years of a warm heart. But for this planet, sometimes called Earth's sister, that heat has betrayed it. That planet is now wrapped in suffocating layers of a poisonous atmosphere made of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid. The pressures on the surface reach almost 100 times the air pressure at Earth's sea level. The average temperatures are more than 700°F, more than hot enough to melt lead, while the deepest valleys see records of more than 900°. If...

Using data that's three decades old, NASA scientists say they've figured out what happens to Venus' heat when it's lost to space — and discovered that the planet's surface may be "squishy" enough for it to be hemorrhaging its internal warmth...This Venusian discovery stems from astronomers trying to understand the planet's surface, which unlike Earth does not have tectonic plates to explain where its heat goes.

Astronomers have long struggled to pin down how long a day lasts on Venus, but new research suggests the difficulty stems not from flawed measurements but from real variations in the planet's spin.In a new study, scientists used a massive radar system to bounce lightwaves off our neighboring planet over the course of more than a decade. As a result, the researchers were able to measure how tilted Venus' axis is, how big its core is, and how long it takes the planet to complete one full rotation...Between 2006 and 2020, the team used this radar system to bounce a...

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What could happen to the earth in the distant future if we don't have the sun to keep us warm anymore or allow plants to grow. 9 minutes 45 seconds long.

Researchers have discovered the molecule phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus. The molecule indicates that life may exist in the acidic clouds high above our sister planet. The discovery of phosphine in the Venusian atmosphere could signal a rejuvenated interest in the planet, which has long been ignored in favor of other locales in the solar system. A mystery lurks in the clouds high above the stifling surface of our nearest planetary neighbor, Venus. Researchers have announced they've found traces of phosphine, a molecule potentially generated by living things, in the planet's clouds. Planetary scientists have long speculated that Venus's...

The researchers report that they were studying the planet's rings, which are collectively called Eta, and discovered that they had an oddly shaped orbit -- not round or even circular. Instead, they describe it as sort of triangular. More study showed that the odd orbit of the rings was due to gravitational pull from Cressida -- one of the planet's moons. The gravitational impact is exaggerated, they note, due to the moon keeping pace with the orbit of the planet. The particles in the ring, on the other hand, move faster than the moon. This results in the moon tugging...

... New research shows that Uranus, a chilly, hostile planet with a number of peculiar features, was the victim of a devastating impact during those early years, and it might explain some of the planet’s strange personality. Uranus moves much differently than the other planets in our Solar System, spinning on its side in comparison to the rest of the worlds in our neighborhood. Astronomers have often wondered just how this happened, but simulations performed by scientists at Durham University’s Institute for Computational Cosmology might have finally produced the answer. “We ran more than 50 different impact scenarios using a...

You might be aware of one of Uranus’ complexities: It spins on its side, and its moons orbit on that same rotated plane. New evidence strengthens the case that Uranus was smashed in a giant collision, resulting in its sideways orientation to its orbital plane and perhaps explaining some of the planet’s other mysteries. A new paper performs a series of simulations on Uranus early in its history, taking note of what an early impact may have done to its rotation rate, atmosphere, and internal structure. The impact could have left a clear signature still visible inside the planet we...

The collision with Uranus of a massive object twice the size of Earth that caused the planet's unusual spin, from a high-resolution simulation using over ten million particles, coloured by their internal energy. Credit: Jacob Kegerreis/Durham University ___________________________________________________________________________ Uranus was hit by a massive object roughly twice the size of Earth that caused the planet to tilt and could explain its freezing temperatures, according to new research. Astronomers at Durham University, UK, led an international team of experts to investigate how Uranus came to be tilted on its side and what consequences a giant impact would have had on the...

Although planets surround stars in the galaxy, how they form remains a subject of debate. Despite the wealth of worlds in our own solar system, scientists still aren't certain how planets are built. Currently, two theories are duking it out for the role of champion. The first and most widely accepted, core accretion, works well with the formation of the terrestrial planets but has problems with giant planets such as Uranus. The second, the disk instability method, may account for the creation of giant planets. "What separates the ice giants from the gas giants is their formation history: during...

Bursts of solar winds caused a huge sparkling region on Uranus, scientists observed this by using Hubble space telescope. Electrons that come from various origins such as solar winds, the planetary ionosphere and moon volcanism, when charged in the form of streams caused this, researchers from the Paris Observatory used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to observe this on Uranus. They were able to catch it in powerful magnetic fields and, controlled it into the upper atmosphere, where set off spectacular bursts of light when made interactions with gas particles, such as oxygen or nitrogen.

It’s impossible to do an article about Uranus without opening up the back door to a spit storm of potty humour.... Anyway, perhaps one of the strangest aspects of Uranus is its tilt.... The Earth is tilted 23.5 degrees away from the Sun’s equator. Mars is 25 degrees, and even Mercury is 2.1 degrees tilted.... Uranus is 97.8 degrees... ...[A]stronomers define the angle as greater than 90 degrees when you take its direction of rotation into account. When you describe it as turning in the same direction as the rest of the planets in the Solar System, then you have...

Scientists have identified 37 volcanic structures on Venus that appear to have been recently active - and probably still are today - painting the picture of a geologically dynamic planet and not a dormant world as long thought. The research focused on ring-like structures called coronae, caused by an upwelling of hot rock from deep within the planet's interior, and provided compelling evidence of widespread recent tectonic and magma activity on Venus's surface, researchers have said. Many scientists had long thought that Venus, lacking the plate tectonics that gradually reshape Earth's surface, was essentially dormant geologically, having been so for...

What started as a dry run to ensure instruments on NASA's Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft worked properly later turned into a 10-year saga that resulted in a chance discovery unrelated to the mission's target planet, Mercury. It's about Venus and its atmosphere. The team reports April 20 in Nature Astronomy that data fortuitously collected by MESSENGER reveals a sudden rise in nitrogen concentrations at about 30 miles above Venus' surface, demonstrating the planet's atmosphere isn't uniformly mixed, as expected. That finding upends an understanding about Venus' atmosphere that has prevailed for decades. The story started...

But if the peoples are rotting in that ultimate civil disease and cannot agree on a monarch from within, and are not conquered and preserved by better nations from without, then providence for their extreme ill has its extreme remedy at hand....

For several years, UCLA astronomers have studied GD 362, a peculiarly dirty white dwarf star 165 light-years away in the constellation Hercules. Now they are pretty sure why the atmosphere of this dense, hot but slowly cooling ghost of a once much larger star is so polluted. It ate a planet.

Radio, IR and optical observations show evolution of plumes and their impact on belts and zones Storm clouds rooted deep in Jupiter's atmosphere are affecting the planet's white zones and colorful belts, creating disturbances in their flow and even changing their color. Thanks to coordinated observations of the planet in January 2017 by six ground-based optical and radio telescopes and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, a University of California, Berkeley, astronomer and her colleagues have been able to track the effects of these storms -- visible as bright plumes above the planet's ammonia ice clouds -- on the belts in which...

One of the big questions in solar physics is why the Sun's activity follows a regular cycle of 11 years. Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), an independent German research institute, now present new findings, indicating that the tidal forces of Venus, Earth and Jupiter influence the solar magnetic field, thus governing the solar cycle.