The carbon dioxide traps most of the heat from the Sun. The cloud layers also act as a blanket. The result is a “runaway greenhouse effect”that has caused the planet's temperature to soar to 465°C, hot enough to melt lead. This means that Venus is even hotter than Mercury. Why i...
Venus has no known moons, which makes it nearly unique in our solar system. The only other designated planet without moons isMercury, which is quite close to the sun. Scientists aren't yet sure why some planets have moons and some do not, but what they can say is that each planet has...
Even Venus’ present-day mantle convection regime is peculiar, lacking the subduction zones and the clear dichotomy between continental and oceanic crust we see on Earth, it also displays more traces of horizontal motion and deformation than the clear stagnant lids operating on Mars and Mercury. ...
with little absorption. This has two important consequences. First, the scattering randomizes the direction of photons so that the top-of-atmosphere radiance is a blurred image of the surface thermal emission. Moroz (2002) estimates that the blurring reduces...