Our Ugly Twin

Earth’s ugly sister planet, Venus is about the same size, but it has an average surface temperature of 870 degrees Fahrenheit or about 465 degrees Celsius, which is well above the melting point of lead, and its atmosphere is laced with corrosive acid.  Venus has a thick atmosphere which is generally described as being pale yellow or orange and it traps heat in a runaway greenhouse effect, making it the hottest planet in our solar system.  Venus is a real oddball, as it is the only planet that spins in a different direction from the other planets around the sun.  Venus spins on its axis clockwise from east to west, while all other planets barring Uranus (which rotates on its side since its axis is tilted almost 98 degrees), spin anti-clockwise from west to east.  The most popular theory about why Venus has a clockwise spin, is that it probably started out with an anti-clockwise spin just like all the other planets, but at some point, in its past, it was struck by a massive object (perhaps another planet) that sent it spinning in a different direction reversing its rotation.  Venus rotates much more slowly than Earth does, so a day on Venus lasts for 243 Earth days, or 5,832 hours and every night is like a month long here on Earth.

Several landers from the former Soviet Union have landed on Venus, but none of them lasted longer than a couple of hours, so they were only able to transmit information for a short time, because the extremely high temperature and pressure on the surface of Venus melted and crushed all of the landers.  Venus is an uninhabitable planet that is thoroughly hostile to life, and it is thought that there is little chance this planet was ever habitable.  Scientists think that Venus lost all of its surface water billions of years ago, which condemned it to its hellish landscape of today.  As its water evaporated, clouds of carbon dioxide formed in the planet’s atmosphere triggering an intense runaway greenhouse effect.  I was looking up fun facts today on BuzzFeed and that is when I discovered that Venus is the only planet that spins clockwise.

Written for the JYProvocative Question #35 which asks us to share a fun fact.