VENUS

Venus is the strangest planet in our solar system, and I’ll prove it to you.

It’s so hot you could cook a sausage on the ground in less than a second. (You’d also be on fire, but you get the idea.) It rains sulfuric acid, except the rain is too lazy to fall all the way to the ground. The Sun rises in the west instead of the east. And brace yourself for this one: a single day on Venus is longer than a whole year on Venus.

What’s really weird is that Venus is right next door to Earth. The two planets are almost the same size. They’re made of the same kind of stuff. Lots of people call Venus our “sister planet.”

So how did our nice, calm sister turn into the worst place in the solar system? Let’s find out.

Quick Facts About Venus

Where Is Venus in the Solar System?

Venus is the second planet from the Sun, sitting in between Mercury and Earth like the middle child it is.

If you walked from the Sun outwards (skipping all the lava and so on), you’d pass Mercury first, then bump into Venus at about 67 million miles. Sunlight makes the same journey in 6 minutes. The same sunlight needs 8 minutes to reach Earth, which means we’re never more than 2 minutes ahead of Venus on weather updates.

Venus is also our closest neighbour in space. When the planets line up just right, they get within 24 million miles of each other. That sounds enormous, but in space terms, it’s basically next door.

Why Venus Is Called Earth’s Sister Planet

Stick Venus and Earth next to each other in a space lineup, and you’d struggle to tell them apart at first glance.

• Venus is 95% the size of Earth.
• Venus weighs almost as much as Earth.
• Gravity is nearly the same. If you weigh 100 pounds on Earth, you’d weigh 91 on Venus, so if you’re tired of the bathroom scales, move to Venus.
• Both planets are made of rock and metal.
• Both formed at the same time, 4.6 billion years ago.

Some scientists reckon Venus might even have had oceans of water once, exactly like Earth. But somewhere along the way, our sister planets ended up living wildly different lives. Today, Venus is so brutal that NASA scientists have a nickname for it: Earth’s evil twin.

→ See how different they really are: Venus vs Earth – How Are They Different?

Does Venus Have Moons or Rings?

Venus has zero moons and zero rings. That’s a bit embarrassing for a major planet. Earth has 1 moon, Mars has 2, and Jupiter is showing off with nearly 100. Even Pluto, which isn’t even officially a planet anymore, has 5.

Why is Venus all alone? Nobody knows for certain. The leading theory is that Venus had a moon ages ago and somehow lost it. Another idea is that Venus has always been too close to the Sun for a moon to settle into orbit.

Why Is Venus the Hottest Planet?

Venus is so hot it would melt your shoes. Probably your trainers, definitely your wellies. It’s the hottest planet in the solar system, and not by a little bit.

The thermometer on Venus reads 462 °C (864 °F). That’s hotter than your oven on its highest setting. It’s hot enough to melt lead, tin, and (if you ever tried) a metal spoon.

What makes it weirder is that Venus stays this hot all the time. Day, night, north pole, south pole, middle bit. There is no cool place. There is no cold season. Every single centimetre of Venus is roasting.

So how does a planet get this toasty? Blame the air. Venus is wrapped in a really thick layer of a gas called carbon dioxide, a bit like an enormous planet-sized duvet. Sunlight squeezes its way in. But once the heat is inside, the duvet won’t let it out. So the heat just sits there. And builds. And builds. And builds.

Scientists have a name for this kind of slow cooker. They call it the runaway greenhouse effect.

The duvet is also incredibly heavy. The air down at the surface presses 92 times harder than the air around you right now. If you stood on Venus, the air alone would crush you flat. It would feel a bit like having a blue whale standing on your head, except worse, because there’d also be acid.

Hotter Than Mercury – Even Though It’s Farther From the Sun

Now here’s a question that’s tripped up plenty of grown-ups. Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun. So shouldn’t Mercury be the hottest?

Funny enough, no. The reason is the air, or rather the complete lack of it. Mercury barely has any atmosphere at all. So when the Sun goes down on Mercury, all the heat escapes straight back into space, and the surface drops to about minus 180 °C overnight. Brutal.

Venus’s thick CO&sub2; duvet doesn’t let any heat escape. Even at midnight on the dark side, Venus is hotter than Mercury at high noon.

→ More on this here: Why Is Venus So Hot? The Greenhouse Effect Explained for Kids

What Is Venus Made Of? Surface, Mountains and Volcanoes

Venus is a rocky planet, in the same club as Earth, Mercury and Mars. Scientists call planets like this terrestrial planets, which is just a fancy word for “made of rock.”

Imagine you could pull all the clouds off Venus like a tablecloth. Underneath, you’d find mountains, plains, valleys and thousands of volcanoes. Everything would look strangely orange too, because Venus’s atmosphere filters the sunlight and only lets the warm colours through.

There’s also some properly weird ground on Venus called tesserae (you say it like TESS-er-ee). It looks like crumpled-up paper that someone tried to flatten with their hand. You won’t find anything like it anywhere else in the solar system.

The most impressive bits of Venus are its two huge highland regions:

• Ishtar Terra sits up north and is roughly the size of Australia.
• Aphrodite Terra stretches across the middle and is about the size of South America.

Sticking up out of Ishtar Terra is the tallest mountain on the whole planet, Maxwell Montes. It’s 11 km high. That makes it taller than Mount Everest. If you tried to climb it, you’d melt long before you reached the top.

How Many Volcanoes Are on Venus?

Loads. Loads and loads.

For ages, scientists reckoned Venus had about 1,600 large volcanoes, which was already a record. But in 2020 a research team took another look at old NASA photos and counted volcanoes of every size. The new total? Over 85,000. Some of them might even be erupting today, while you’re reading this.

Venus also has a special kind of volcano you won’t find anywhere else: the pancake dome. These are flat, round splats of lava that puddle out across the ground. They look almost exactly like a pancake somebody dropped from space.

→ Volcano deep-dive here: Volcanoes on Venus

A Day on Venus Is Longer Than Its Year

Right, fasten your seatbelt for this one. On Venus, a single day is longer than an entire year.

Yes, you read that correctly.

A “year” on a planet just means how long it takes to travel once around the Sun. A “day” means how long it takes the planet to spin around once. On Earth, the year takes 365 days and the day takes 24 hours, so there’s no confusion.

On Venus, the maths gets weird:

• One year on Venus = 225 Earth days (one lap of the Sun)
• One day on Venus = 243 Earth days (one full spin)

Venus is so slow at spinning that it actually finishes a whole year before it manages to finish a single day. Think of it this way: you’d have your birthday before you’d even had breakfast.

Why Venus Spins Backwards

Now stretch your brain a bit further, because Venus also spins backwards.

Most planets spin in the same direction Earth does. Venus has decided to do the exact opposite. Scientists call this retrograde rotation, which is a posh way of saying “the wrong way round.”

If you were standing on Venus, the Sun would rise in the west and set in the east. Sunsets on the wrong side of the sky.

Why does Venus spin backwards? The honest answer is, nobody is completely sure. The most popular theory is that a planet-sized object slammed into Venus a few billion years ago and knocked it upside down. A few scientists think the thick atmosphere itself has been slowly braking the planet’s spin over billions of years. Either way, Venus is wrong-side-up compared to the rest of us.

→ More on Venus’s strange day: How Long Is a Day on Venus?

The Morning Star and the Evening Star

Pop outside on a clear evening just after the Sun has gone down, and look towards the west. If there’s a really bright “star” hanging low in the sky, way brighter than any of the proper stars, congratulations. You’ve spotted Venus.

Venus is the third brightest thing in our entire sky, after the Sun and the Moon. Two reasons. First, Venus is close to us. Second, those thick clouds we keep complaining about reflect about 70% of the sunlight that hits them, so the planet is basically a giant disco ball.

People have been watching Venus for thousands of years. The Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks and Mayans all wrote about it long before anyone had a telescope. But here’s the bit that always makes me smile. Those ancient astronomers didn’t realise the bright “star” before dawn and the bright “star” after sunset were the same object. So they gave them two separate names:

• The Morning Star (Venus appearing before sunrise)
• The Evening Star (Venus appearing after sunset)

Both of them are Venus. Same planet, different shifts.

The first person to figure out something deeper was a chap called Galileo Galilei. In 1610 he pointed an early telescope at Venus and noticed it had phases, exactly like the Moon. Sometimes it was full, sometimes a slim crescent. That observation was a massive deal, because it proved Venus had to be orbiting the Sun, not the Earth. The whole way scientists understood the universe shifted because of those little crescent shapes.

Oh, and the name. The Romans named the planet after the Roman goddess of love and beauty, because they thought Venus was the most beautiful thing in the night sky. It’s the only planet in the solar system named after a female.

→ How to spot Venus tonight: Why Is Venus Called the Morning Star?

Venus’s Air – Acid Clouds and Crushing Pressure

Calling Venus’s air “bad” is a bit like calling a shark “a bit nippy.” It’s properly nasty up there.

The clouds on Venus aren’t fluffy water clouds like ours. They’re sulfuric acid. The same sort of acid that, on Earth, can dissolve metal if you give it long enough.

The air down at the surface isn’t really air the way you and I think of it either. It’s 92 times heavier than what you’re breathing right now, and so dense that it behaves almost like a slow liquid. Not great for breathing.

And yes, it rains on Venus. Acid rain, naturally. Except the rain has a strange habit: it never actually lands. The surface is so hot that the acid drops boil back into gas while still falling through the sky. Scientists call this kind of rain virga, which is the rare case where a science word is also quite a beautiful one.

Up at the very top of the clouds, the winds get genuinely silly. They blow at 360 km/h (224 mph), which is faster than any hurricane Earth has ever produced. Those winds are so quick that the entire Venusian cloud layer makes a full lap of the planet every four Earth days. The clouds basically have their own travel schedule.

→ More on Venus’s wild atmosphere: Venus’s Atmosphere – Acid Clouds and Crushing Pressure

Could Anyone Live on Venus?

If you imagined yourself standing on Venus’s surface in a t-shirt and jeans, please stop imagining that. It would not go well.

Here’s what would happen, in order, in the first few seconds:

1. The air would squish you flat.
2. The acid would eat through your clothes.
3. The heat would melt you (you’d already be flat and clothes-less, so honestly the heat is a mercy).
4. You couldn’t breathe, because the air is almost all carbon dioxide.

The longest any human-built spacecraft has ever managed on Venus’s surface is two hours. After that, the heat got it, or the pressure got it, or both at once.

So the surface is a definite no. But here’s something genuinely cool. If you go up about 50 km into Venus’s atmosphere, the planet stops trying to kill you. Up there, the temperature is around 30 to 70 °C (warm, but survivable), the air pressure feels just like Earth’s, and there’s loads of sunshine.

Some scientists have started drawing up serious plans for floating cloud cities. Imagine giant balloons floating through Venus’s clouds, with people living comfortably inside. NASA has an actual mission concept for this called HAVOC. It is not science fiction. Engineers are working on it.

And then there’s the maybe-life thing. In 2020, a team of scientists found traces of a gas called phosphine drifting around in Venus’s clouds. On Earth, phosphine is almost only ever made by living creatures. So either something is alive up there, or there’s a chemical explanation we haven’t worked out yet. Future missions are heading to Venus to find out, and the answer is going to be huge either way.

→ Could humans really go there? Can Humans Live on Venus?

Exploring Venus – How We Study It

No human has ever been to Venus, and frankly, no human ever should. But over 40 robot spacecraft have made the trip. Here are the ones whose names you should know:

• Mariner 2 (1962) was the first spacecraft to reach another planet at all. It just flew past, but that was already a massive achievement.
• Venera 7 (1970) went one better and actually landed on Venus, making it the first spacecraft to land on any other planet ever. It survived for 23 minutes before the heat finished it off.
• Magellan (1990) carried radar that could see through Venus’s clouds. It mapped 98% of the surface, which is how we have any idea what Venus actually looks like.
• Venus Express (2006–2014) was a European orbiter that spent eight years studying the atmosphere.
• Akatsuki (2015 to now) is Japanese, and it’s still doing science around Venus today.

The exciting news is that three new missions are about to launch, and Venus is going to be a much busier place in the 2030s:

• DAVINCI (NASA) will drop a probe straight down through Venus’s atmosphere, measuring the air all the way to the ground.
• VERITAS (NASA) will map Venus in much higher detail than Magellan ever could.
• EnVision (European Space Agency) will study the surface, the atmosphere, and even the inside of the planet.

Scientists have already started calling the 2030s the Decade of Venus, which sounds like a slightly menacing band name but is actually a lovely thing.

→ Every spacecraft, in order: Missions to Venus

Mind-Blowing Wow Facts About Venus

Here are some Venus facts you can use to win arguments with siblings:

• Venus is hot enough to melt lead.
• A day on Venus is longer than its year.
• The Sun rises in the west on Venus.
• There are more volcanoes on Venus than on any other planet. Over 85,000 of them.
• Venus is the only planet named after a female god.
• Venus is the brightest planet you can see in the sky.
• The air on Venus is so thick, you’d feel like you were 1 km underwater.
• It rains acid on Venus, but the rain never lands.
• Wind at the top of the clouds blows at 360 km/h, faster than any hurricane on Earth.
• Venus has no moons and no rings.
• Venus once had oceans of water, until they boiled away.
• Maxwell Montes, Venus’s tallest mountain, is bigger than Mount Everest.
• The longest a spacecraft has ever survived on Venus’s surface is just 2 hours.
• Venus has lightning storms in its acid clouds, and scientists are still trying to work out exactly how they happen.

→ Want all 20? 20 Mind-Blowing Wow Facts About Venus for Kids

Venus Glossary – Big Words Made Simple

• Atmosphere – the layer of gases (or “air”) around a planet.
• Carbon dioxide (CO&sub2;) – a gas that traps heat. Most of Venus’s air is made of it.
• Greenhouse effect – when gases trap the Sun’s heat, like a blanket on a planet.
• Retrograde rotation – when a planet spins backwards.
• Sidereal day – the time a planet takes to spin around once.
• Solar day – the time from one sunrise to the next.
• Terrestrial planet – a rocky planet like Venus, Earth, Mercury, or Mars.
• Tesserae – bumpy, wrinkled-looking land found on Venus.
• Virga – rain that disappears before it hits the ground.

Venus FAQ – Quick Answers to Big Questions

Why is Venus called Earth’s sister planet?

Because Venus is almost the same size and weight as Earth, and the two planets formed at the same time from the same materials. They’re also next-door neighbours in space.

Why is Venus the hottest planet?

Because it has a really thick blanket of carbon dioxide gas. The gas traps the Sun’s heat and won’t let it escape, so Venus gets hotter and hotter. This is called the runaway greenhouse effect.

How long is a day on Venus?

About 243 Earth days. That’s actually longer than a Venus year, which is only 225 Earth days.

Does Venus have any moons?

No. Venus has no moons and no rings. It’s one of only two planets in the solar system without a moon. Mercury is the other.

Why does Venus spin backwards?

Nobody is sure. Most scientists think a giant space rock crashed into Venus a long time ago and flipped it upside down.

How far is Venus from the Sun?

About 67 million miles (108 million km). Sunlight takes 6 minutes to get there.

How big is Venus compared to Earth?

Venus is just a little smaller than Earth, about 95% of Earth’s size.

Does it rain on Venus?

Yes, but it rains sulfuric acid, not water. And the rain never reaches the ground because Venus is too hot. The acid evaporates back into gas first.

Has anyone landed on Venus?

No human, ever. But more than 40 robot spacecraft have visited. The first to land was Venera 7 in 1970. None of the landers survived more than 2 hours.

What colour is Venus?

From space it looks creamy yellow because of its thick acid clouds. If you stood on the surface, everything would look orange because of the air.

Learn More About Venus

Want to keep exploring? Pick where to go next:

• Why Is Venus So Hot?
• Venus vs Earth – How Are They Different?
• How Long Is a Day on Venus?
• Volcanoes on Venus
• Can Humans Live on Venus?
• Venus’s Atmosphere
• Missions to Venus
• Why Is Venus Called the Morning Star?
• 20 Mind-Blowing Wow Facts About Venus for Kids
• The Ultimate Venus Quiz for Kids