This comes after the theory of life existing in Venus
Venus is currently what the Earth can be, if climate change is not taken seriously. The planet, which is our neighbour, is currently inhospitable and contains acidic clouds and desert rock, and in a new research, it’s believed to be caused by Jupiter.
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Venus actually had quite the habitable atmosphere. The study states that the gravitational pull of Jupiter pushed Venus closer to the Sun, and created a runway greenhouse effect and vaporised it’s oceans.
The researchers used a computer model to track the position of planets across the Solar System, and showed that as Jupiter moved away from the Sun around a billion years ago, it caused Venus to move into the almost perfect circular orbit that it follows to this day.
The unusual orbit
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Astrobiologist Stephen Kane from the University of California, Riverside had this to say: “As Jupiter migrated, Venus would have gone through dramatic changes in climate, heating up then cooling off and increasingly losing its water into the atmosphere.”
Venus’s orbit had been the topic of much discussion as it was very precise and circular. The other planets always stand at distances that vary throughout the year. Due to this, the scientists believe that the planet would have been a lot more hospitable, had it not been put into this situation.
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If there had been life on Venus, it would very likely to have been killed off ages ago. Even after the discovery of phosphine gas on Venus’s atmosphere, the team believes that it’s very likely microbes which had been surviving under the harshest of conditions for the last billion years.
The reason for studying Venus is because it shares a lot of similarities with Earth, and if we get to understand it more, we can prevent it from heading the same way.
(Cover: NASA)