Venus is Earth's sister planet with similar size, gravity, and composition. It is covered by dense clouds of sulfuric acid that prevent views of its surface. Venus has the densest atmosphere of all terrestrial planets, consisting mostly of carbon dioxide. The surface is estimated to be around 250 million years old and shows signs of past volcanic activity, including many volcanoes and volcanic features like farra and coronae. Evidence suggests ongoing volcanic eruptions still shape the surface today.
Venus is Earth's sister planet with similar size, gravity, and composition. It is covered by dense clouds of sulfuric acid that prevent views of its surface. Venus has the densest atmosphere of all terrestrial planets, consisting mostly of carbon dioxide. The surface is estimated to be around 250 million years old and shows signs of past volcanic activity, including many volcanoes and volcanic features like farra and coronae. Evidence suggests ongoing volcanic eruptions still shape the surface today.
Original Description:
Information about the physical landscape of the planet Venus.
Venus is Earth's sister planet with similar size, gravity, and composition. It is covered by dense clouds of sulfuric acid that prevent views of its surface. Venus has the densest atmosphere of all terrestrial planets, consisting mostly of carbon dioxide. The surface is estimated to be around 250 million years old and shows signs of past volcanic activity, including many volcanoes and volcanic features like farra and coronae. Evidence suggests ongoing volcanic eruptions still shape the surface today.
Venus is Earth's sister planet with similar size, gravity, and composition. It is covered by dense clouds of sulfuric acid that prevent views of its surface. Venus has the densest atmosphere of all terrestrial planets, consisting mostly of carbon dioxide. The surface is estimated to be around 250 million years old and shows signs of past volcanic activity, including many volcanoes and volcanic features like farra and coronae. Evidence suggests ongoing volcanic eruptions still shape the surface today.
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Venus
Venus is classified as a terrestrial planet and it is sometimes called Earth's
"sister planet" due to the similar size, gravity, and bulk composition. Venus is covered with an opaque layer of highly reflective clouds of sulfuric acid, preventing its surface from being seen from space in visible light. Venus has the densest atmosphere of all the terrestrial planets in our solar system, consisting mostly of carbon dioide. Venus has no carbon cycle to lock carbon back into rocks and surface features, nor does it seem to have any organic life to absorb it in biomass. ! younger Venus is believed to have possessed Earth"like oceans, but these evaporated as the temperature rose, leaving a dusty dry desertscape with many slab"like rocks. #he water has most likely dissociated, and, because of the lack of a planetary magnetic field, the hydrogen has been swept into interplanetary space by the solar wind. #he atmospheric pressure at the planet's surface is $% times that of the Earth. !bout &'( of the Venusian surface is covered by smooth volcanic plains, consisting of )'( plains with wrinkle ridges and *'( smooth or lobate plains. #wo highland "continents" make up the rest of its surface area, one lying in the planet's northern hemisphere and the other +ust south of the equator. #he northern continent is called ,shtar #erra, after ,shtar, the -abylonian goddess of love, and is about the size of !ustralia. .awell .ontes, the highest mountain on Venus, lies on ,shtar #erra. ,ts peak is ** km above the Venusian average surface elevation. #he southern continent is called !phrodite #erra, after the /reek goddess of love, and is the larger of the two highland regions at roughly the size of 0outh !merica. ! network of fractures and faults covers much of this area. !s well as the impact craters, mountains, and valleys commonly found on rocky planets, Venus has a number of unique surface features. !mong these are flat" topped volcanic features called farra, which look somewhat like pancakes and range in size from %'12' km across, and *''1*,''' m high3 radial, star"like fracture systems called novae3 features with both radial and concentric fractures resembling spider webs, known as arachnoids and coronae, circular rings of fractures sometimes surrounded by a depression. #hese features are volcanic in origin. .ost Venusian surface features are named after historical and mythological women.
Eceptions are .awell .ontes, named after 4ames 5lerk .awell, and highland regions !lpha 6egio, -eta 6egio and 7vda 6egio. #he former three features were named before the current system was adopted by the ,nternational !stronomical 8nion, the body that oversees planetary nomenclature. .uch of the Venusian surface appears to have been shaped by volcanic activity. Venus has several times as many volcanoes as Earth, and it possesses some *9) massive volcanoes that are over *'' km across. #he only volcanic comple of this size on Earth is the -ig ,sland of :awaii.
:owever, this is not because Venus is more volcanically active than Earth, but because its crust is older. Earth's oceanic crust is continually recycled by subduction at the boundaries of tectonic plates, and has an average age of about *'' million years, while the Venusian surface is estimated to be about 2'' million years old. 0everal lines of evidence point to ongoing volcanic activity on Venus. ;uring the 0oviet Venera program, the Venera ** and Venera *% probes detected a constant stream of lightning, and Venera *% recorded a powerful clap of thunder soon after it landed. #he European 0pace !gency's Venus Epress recorded abundant lightning in the high atmosphere. <hile rainfall drives thunderstorms on Earth, there is no rainfall on the surface of Venus =though it does rain sulfuric acid in the upper atmosphere that evaporates around %2 km above the surface>. 7ne possibility is that ash from a volcanic eruption was generating the lightning. !nother piece of evidence comes from measurements of sulfur dioide concentrations in the atmosphere, which were found to drop by a factor of *' between *$)& and *$&9. #his may imply that the levels had earlier been boosted by a large volcanic eruption. #here are almost a thousand impact craters on Venus evenly distributed across its surface. 7n other cratered bodies, such as the Earth and the .oon, craters show a range of states of degradation. 7n the .oon, degradation is caused by subsequent impacts, while on Earth, it is caused by wind and rain erosion. :owever, on Venus, about &2( of craters are in pristine condition. #he number of craters together with their well"preserved condition indicates that the planet underwent a global resurfacing event about 2'' million years ago, followed by a decay in volcanism. Earth's crust is in continuous motion, but it is thought that Venus cannot sustain such a process. <ithout plate tectonics to dissipate heat from its mantle, Venus instead undergoes a cyclical process in which mantle temperatures rise until they reach a critical level that weakens the crust. #hen, over a period of about *'' million years, subduction occurs on an enormous scale, completely recycling the crust. Venusian craters range from ? km to %&' km in diameter. #here are no craters smaller than ? km, because of the effects of the dense atmosphere on incoming ob+ects. 7b+ects with less than a certain kinetic energy are slowed down so much by the atmosphere that they do not create an impact crater. ,ncoming pro+ectiles less than 2' meters in diameter will fragment and burn up in the atmosphere before reaching the ground. @
