By: Yopi Nadia, teacher at SDN 106 / IX Muaro Sebapo, Muaro Jambi, province of Jambi
KOMPA.com – Planet Venus nicknamed the Morning Star. Because this planet looks bright and can be seen with the naked eye.
In addition to the morning star, the planet Venus is also known as the morning star or evening star.
Venus is one of the four terrestrial planets of the Solar System. This means that Venus is a rocky planet like the Earth.
Venus is similar in size and mass to the Earth. Hence it is often referred to as the “brother” or “twin” of the Earth.
The name Venus is taken from the goddess of love in Greek mythology. The planet Venus belongs to the category of inner planets, along with Earth and Mercury.
The diameter of the planet Venus is approximately 7,521 miles or 12,104 kilometers. About 80 percent of its surface is made up of volcanic earth. 70 percent is terrain with rough ridges and 10 percent is smooth, jagged terrain.
Read also: Venus, the brightest planet in the solar system
20 percent of Venus’s territory consists of two highland continents. One is located in the northern hemisphere of Venus, while the other is south of the equator.
The northern continent is called Ishtar Terra, its size is approximately the size of Australia. The highest mountain on Venus, namely Maxwell Montes, is located on Ishtar Terra. Its height is about 11 kilometers above the average height of the surface of Venus.
Meanwhile, the southern continent is called Aphrodite Terra, its size is more or less comparable to South America. This continent is full of a series of fractures and faults.
Venus has a very dense atmosphere, made up of 96.5% carbon dioxide and 3.5% nitrogen.
The mass of its atmosphere is 93 times greater than the earth’s atmosphere. While the pressure is 92 times greater than the earth’s surface.
The surface of Venus is hotter than Mercury. The surface temperature is a minimum of 220º Celsius (-364.0º Fahrenheit) and a maximum of 420º Celsius (788º Fahrenheit).
Read also: Why do Mercury and Venus have no natural satellites?
Due to its distance from the Sun, Venus receives only 25 percent of the radiation from Mercury.
The surface of Venus is often described as hellish. The temperature is higher than the temperature for sterilization.
Research shows that billions of years ago, Venus’s atmosphere was more like that of Earth and that there may have been water on its surface.
But after a period of between 600 million and several billion years, the greenhouse effect continues due to the evaporation of water which produces greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Although the surface of Venus does not support life as it does on Earth, the existence of habitable niches in the initial lower and middle layers cannot be ignored.
The surface of Venus is isothermal. The planet has a constant temperature, not only day and night, but also between the equator and the poles.
Read also: 8 planets in the solar system
Venus’s axial tilt of less than 3º also minimizes seasonal temperature variations. The only appreciable variation in temperature depends on the altitude.
In 1995, the Magellan spacecraft managed to capture an image of a highly reflective substance on top of the tallest mountain that looks a lot like snow on Earth.
This substance is probably formed by the same process as snow, although the temperature is much higher.
This snow is too volatile on the surface, so it rises to colder altitudes as a gas and therefore experiences precipitation.
The clouds of Venus are capable of producing lightning like clouds on Earth. The existence of lightning has been controversial since its first discovery by the Venera spacecraft.
From 2006 to 2007, Venus Express managed to find electromagnetic waves of electrons that are signs of lightning.
Read also: Asteroids, rocks in the solar system
Its intermittent presence shows a pattern related to weather activity. In 2007, the Venus Express spacecraft discovered an atmospheric vortex at the south pole of Venus.
Then, in 2011, this spacecraft also managed to find the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere of Venus.
Venus orbits the sun for 224.65 days. Although all planetary orbits are elliptical, the orbit of Venus is nearly circular.
Every 584 days there is a lower conjunction, which is when Venus is between the Earth and the sun, so that Venus is at its closest average distance from Earth, which is 41 million kilometers.
Venus can approach the Earth up to a distance of 38.2 million kilometers. Due to the reduced eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit, the minimum distance to Venus is predicted to increase in tens of thousands of years.
All the planets in the solar system orbit the sun in a counterclockwise direction. Most planets also rotate on their axes counterclockwise. However, Venus rotates clockwise every 243 Earth days, which is the slowest rotation in the solar system.
Read also: Why are not all planets in the solar system habitable for humans?
Venus’s equator rotates at 6.5 kilometers per hour, while the rotational speed of the Earth at the equator is 1,670 kilometers per hour.
Venus’s rotation slows to 6.5 minutes per Venus sidereal day. Consequently, the length of the solar day on Venus is shorter than its sidereal day, which is 116.75 Earth days.
Therefore, the solar day of Venus is shorter than the solar day of Mercury, which is 176 Earth days). One Venus year equals 1.92 Venus (sun) days.
For observers, the sun will rise in the west and set in the east on the planet Venus.
Venus has no natural satellites. Earlier, in the 17th century, Giovanni Cassini reported the existence of a satellite in orbit around Venus, called Neith.
200 years later, observation reports emerged stating that such satellites did not exist and that most of them were just distant stars.
Read also: Characteristics of the planets in the solar system
Meanwhile, early solar system models, created by Alex Alemi and David Stevenson at the California Institute of Technology, suggest that Venus may have had a single satellite formed from a massive impact event billions of years ago.
About 10 million years later, another collision changed the direction of rotation of Venus and, as a result, the Venusian satellite slowly decelerated at tidal level, eventually colliding with Venus. In the event of a collision, the satellite would suffer the same fate.
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