“Why Venus is the Hottest Planet in the Solar System”

SPACE — Venus, the second planet from the sun, is the hottest and brightest planet in the solar system. This scorching (terrestrial) type planet is named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty. Because of this, Venus is the only planet in the solar system to be named after a woman according to the International Astronomical Union naming convention used by the astronomical community.

Venus may have been named the most beautiful of the Roman (and Greek) gods because it shone the brightest of the five planets known to ancient astronomers. However, in the ancient Greek countries and cities, Venus was called Aphrodite.

In ancient times, Venus was often thought of as two distinct stars, the evening star and the morning star, that is, the star that first appears at sunset and sunrise. In Christian Latin, they are known as Vespers and Lucifer respectively. (In Christian times, Lucifer, or the bringer of light, was known by the name Satan.

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However, further observations of Venus in the space age reveal an extremely dire environment. This makes Venus a very difficult planet to observe up close because spacecraft are unable to stay on its surface for long.

Why is Venus called the hottest planet?

The reason Venus is so hot is because of the Sun. Venus’ atmosphere continues to receive large amounts of solar radiation, so heat transfer is not very efficient. The atmosphere on the surface of Venus is carbon dioxide heated and pressurized so that it is more like a hot liquid than a gas.

As an illustration of how hot Venus is, if you stand on its surface, it can burn, melt, and disintegrate. In fact, Venus is capable of melting metals. “This strange behavior is called ‘super-critical’, and on Venus, the atmosphere flowing around the surface landscape and rocks is supercritical carbon dioxide, which is poorly understood,” said Dr James B Garvin, principal investigator for the Davinci mission at NASA Goddard.

Davinci stands for Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging. It was NASA’s attempt to send a robotic daredevil to Venus. They hope to obtain more accurate data by penetrating the toxic atmosphere and touching its hot surface more intensely. Source: Space.com

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