Jakarta –
So far, Mercury is known as the planet closest to the sun. But does this close distance from the sun make Mercury the hottest planet?
Quoted from detikEdu, the hottest planet in our solar system is Venus. The second closest planet to the Sun has an average surface temperature of about 450°C!
But Mercury isn’t the hottest planet because it has an atmosphere to regulate temperature, so Mercury isn’t as hot as Venus.
In terms of size, the planet Venus is almost the same size as the Earth, with Venus’ diameter being 12,102 kilometers and Earth’s diameter being 12,742 kilometers.
The distance between Venus and the Sun is 108 million kilometers. To rotate, Venus takes 243 days and takes 225 days to evolve around the Sun.
So why is Venus the hottest planet? Quoting the IFL Science page, Venus may be hotter than Mercury due to its cloud cover. Venus’s atmosphere is about 100 times thicker than Earth’s.
The atmosphere of Venus is 96% carbon dioxide; 3.4% nitrogen; 0.1 – 0.5 percent water vapor and the rest is other gases.
The reason Venus is so hot is because of the Sun. This region of Venus’ atmosphere receives a large amount of radiation, so heat transfer is not very efficient.
To describe the heat on Venus, if we stand on its surface, it can burn, melt and disintegrate all at once.
So which planet is hotter than Venus? If you want to find a hotter planet than Venus, you have to look far beyond the solar system, 670 light-years away to be exact.
In November 2022, scientists recorded the hottest planet ever known. The exoplanet is KELT-9b.
KELT-9b orbits very close to a star that is nearly twice as hot as our sun.
The average temperature of the planet is 3,800°C (just over 6,800°F). That temperature is hot enough to melt tungsten, the material used in light bulb filaments.
This article was published on detikEdu with the title Not Mercury, this planet turns out to be the hottest in the solar system
(yum/sphere)
