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Venus may have had liquid surface water early in its history with a habitable environment, [24] [25] before a runaway greenhouse effect evaporated any water and turned Venus into its present state. [26] [27] [28] The rotation of Venus has been slowed and turned against its orbital direction by the currents and drag of its atmosphere. [29]
Thermal equilibrium exists when the power supplied by the star is equal to the power emitted by the planet. The temperature at which this balance occurs is the planetary equilibrium temperature. [ 4 ] [ 5 ] [ 6 ]
The atmosphere of Venus supports decks of opaque clouds of sulfuric acid that cover the entire planet, preventing optical Earth-based and orbital observation of the surface. Information about surface topography has been obtained exclusively by radar imaging. Aside from the very surface layers, the atmosphere is in a state of vigorous ...
Artist's conception of a terraformed Venus.The cloud formations are depicted assuming the planet's rotation has not been accelerated. The terraforming of Venus or the terraformation of Venus is the hypothetical process of engineering the global environment of the planet Venus in order to make it suitable for human habitation.
Venus probably began with a fast prograde rotation with a period of several hours much like most of the planets in the Solar System. Venus is close enough to the Sun to experience significant gravitational tidal dissipation, and also has a thick enough atmosphere to create thermally driven atmospheric tides that create a retrograde torque.
Venus' oceans may have boiled away in a runaway greenhouse effect. A runaway greenhouse effect involving carbon dioxide and water vapor likely occurred on Venus. [22] In this scenario, early Venus may have had a global ocean if the outgoing thermal radiation was below the Simpson–Nakajima limit but above the moist greenhouse limit. [2]
The final state, in this view, is described as one of "equilibrium" in which all motion ceases. [ 5 ] The idea of heat death as a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics, however, was first proposed in loose terms beginning in 1851 by Lord Kelvin (William Thomson), who theorized further on the mechanical energy loss views of Sadi Carnot (1824 ...
The surface of Venus is comparatively flat. When 93% of the topography was mapped by Pioneer Venus Orbiter, scientists found that the total distance from the lowest point to the highest point on the entire surface was about 13 kilometres (8.1 mi), about the same as the vertical distance between the Earth's ocean floor and the higher summits of the Himalayas.