Κατηγορίες

Venus May Have Been Habitable Until a Mysterious Catastrophe Millions of Years Ago


Venus is not a nice place, by human standards. For a world named after a Roman goddess of love and beauty, it really is quite the toxic, super-heated hellscape. But it wasn't always this way.

In a new study, scientists make the case for how ancient Venus could have once supported life alongside oceans of liquid water, until a mysterious resurfacing event took all that away about 700 million years ago.

"Our hypothesis is that Venus may have had a stable climate for billions of years," says planetary scientist Michael Way from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

"It is possible that the near-global resurfacing event is responsible for its transformation from an Earth-like climate to the hellish hot-house we see today."

The research – presented last week at the EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting 2019 in Geneva, Switzerland – builds upon two previously published studies by Way and his team, and related papers modelling virtualised Venus-like worlds and topographies.

The upshot, the team says, is that 3D GCM (general circulation model) mathematical modelling supports the 'optimistic' view that Venus "spent most of its history with surface liquid water, plate tectonics, and subsequently a stable temperate climate akin to that of Earth through much of its own [history]".

This period of Earth-like climatic stability with liquid water in Venusian oceans may have lasted for up to 3 billion years, the researchers think, based on a number of simulations of what the ancient planet's climate conditions may have been like.

read more here

Post a Comment

To Top