Venus - The Facts!

Name Games

  • Venus is the only planet named after a Roman Goddess rather than God.
  • Venus was the Goddess of Beauty and Love. The same Goddess was named ‘Aphrodite’ by the Greeks and ‘Ishtar’ by the Babylonians.
  • The name reflects the fact that Venus appears in the night sky as the brightest of all the planets, and far brighter than any star.
  • Venus is also known as ‘The Evening Star’ or ‘The Morning Star’, depending on its position in the sky. It has two different nicknames because the Greeks misinterpreted its appearance in these two positions as two different planets.
  • With few exceptions, all surface features on Venus take their names from women whose achievements shook the Earth.

Venus Versus Earth: Facts & Figures

  • Venus is similar to Earth in size, mass, composition, and distance from the Sun.
  • Both planets have relatively young surfaces, Venus appearing to have been completely resurfaced 300 to 500 million years ago.
  • Venus’ interior is also probably very similar to that of Earth, containing an iron core about 3,000 km in radius, and a molten rocky mantle covering the majority of the planet. Recent results from the Magellan spacecraft suggest that Venus’ crust is stronger and thicker than previously thought.
  • Unlike Earth, however, Venus’ day is longer than its year! The planet  rotates on its axis (= day-length) once every 243 Earth days, while it orbits the Sun (= year-length) every 225 days.
  • Venus also rotates in a ‘retrograde’, or backwards-compared-to-Earth manner, spinning in the opposite direction of its orbit around the Sun. So from its surface, the Sun would seem to rise in the west and set in the east.
  • Venus has no moons, and no magnetic field of its own, though the solar wind streaming by Venus creates a second-hand magnetic field around the planet.
  • Venus has no oceans.  The planet’s unique brightness results from sunlight reflecting back into space from its dense cloud-cover. These clouds contain almost no water, but rather droplets of sulphuric acid and carbon dioxide. In the upper layers, the clouds move faster than hurricane-force winds on Earth.
The thick, rapidly swirling clouds allow solar heat in, but not out. This ‘Greenhouse Effect’ creates a broiling, sultry atmosphere.  The surface temperatures of over 450C+are the hottest anywhere in the Solar System; while the surface pressures are equivalent to those at about a kilometre deep in the Earth’s ocean. No wonder our sturdiest-built state-of-the-art human made probes only survive a few hours on Venus!