Was Venus ever habitable or was it always a suffocating hellscape?

Venusthe planet closest to us, the so-called Earth’s “evil twin”it could have been so hellish since birth that never had the opportunity to harbor life as we know it. The latest results of a investigation on atmospheric composition, carried out by a Cambridge team and published in Nature Astronomysupport, in fact, the hypothesis that Venus has never had oceans of liquid water: even insideit’s all dry.

What we know about Venus

Venus is the second closest planet to the Sun in our system. It is also the closest to Earth and the one more like him in size, mass, density and mineral composition. However, there are also several differences with our planet: Venus is today a hellwith an average temperature of about 500°Ca atmospheric pressure at sea ​​level 92 times higher than that of Earth and asphyxiating clouds of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid.

Due to these characteristics and the fact that it is located at the edge of the habitable zone of the Solar System, many believe that it is possible that Venus in the early part of its history (the planet is about 4.6 billion years old) temperatures were mild enough to allow the existence of liquid water oceans and, therefore, the requirements to host life as we know it. Only then something went wrong and the planet suffered a dramatic greenhouse effect due to intense volcanic activity that made him what he is today.

However, not everyone thinks the same. There is also the possibility that Venus I was born being hell and there would never be any way for water to condense on the surface.

“Both theories,” explains Tereza Constantinou, lead author of the research, “are based on climate modelsbut we wanted to take a different approach based on observations of the atmospheric chemistry current of Venus”.

a dry planet

Researchers explain that the atmosphere of Venus is stable and, for it to remain so, the substances consumed must be replaced by others from the interior of the planet through volcanic activity.

By studying the phenomenon, they discovered that the composition of the gases eruptive Venusians is made up of a maximum of 6% water vapor. In other words, volcanic eruptions on Venus are “dry”an indication that the interior of the planet is also. By comparison, the gases from volcanic eruptions on Earth contain a lot of water vapor precisely because the interior of our planet is rich in water.