Interesting Facts and Notes on Venus Planet

Venus is similar to Earth in many ways and is closer in distance to Earth than any other planet, and it has a similar size and composition. Key facts about Venus are as follows:

• A Venus year is equal to 225 days while a Venus day is equal to 243 days. Thus, a day on Venus is longer than a year.
• Venus rotates on its polar axis backwards compared to Earth, so a Venus sunrise occurs in the west and sunset in the east.
• Venus is blanketed by a thick atmosphere nearly 100 times denser than Earth; it is made mostly of carbon dioxide, along with some nitrogen and trace amounts of water vapor, acids, and heavy metals. No terrestrial life is possible on Venus.
• Venus’s clouds are laced with poisonous sulphur dioxide, and its surface temperature is 500°C. Interestingly, this is even hotter than Mercury, which is much closer to the Sun. These hostile conditions are because of a runaway greenhouse effect on Venus.
• Since Venus is closer to the Sun than Earth, it is never up in the sky at midnight. Rather, Venus is visible in the sky either just after dark or just before sunrise, depending on the season, so it is called Morning or Evening Star.
• Further, due to highly reflective clouds on Venus, its albedo is much higher and it looks as third brightest object in the sky, after the Sun and the Moon.
• Through a small telescope, it is possible to see Venus undergo phases, just like the Moon. This occurs because, from our point of view on Earth, we see only the parts of Venus that are illuminated by sunlight at any given time. However, unlike the Moon, though, Venus is usually brighter to our view in its crescent phase than in its full phase.
• The magnetic field of Venus is far weaker than that of Earth because it is assumed that the core of Venus is less convective and may have already solidified.