yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Venus 101 | National Geographic


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

(Ethereal music) - [Angeli Gabriel] Named after the ancient Roman goddess of beauty, Venus is known for its exceptional brightness in the night sky. But behind this facade is a world of storms and infernos unlike anywhere else in the solar system.

Venus, the second planet from the sun, is very similar to Earth from a distance. But up close, it's a very different world. Venus is about the same size as Earth, just slightly smaller. Its structure is also nearly identical, with an iron core, a hot mantle, and a rocky crust.

The crust of Venus, however, is dotted with thousands of volcanoes, including Maxwell Montes, a volcano almost as tall as Mount Everest. Venus also has a thick layered atmosphere. It's full of clouds that rain (thunder cracking) sulfuric acid and whip around the planet at speeds up to 224 miles per hour. Faster than some category five hurricanes.

The atmosphere is so thick that it creates a surface pressure similar to what it would be about half a mile deep in the Earth's oceans. This pressure is heavy enough that a human standing on Venus' surface would be crushed. The atmosphere is made of greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide, which create an extreme case of global warming.

They trap the sun's heat, causing surface temperatures to rise over 880 degrees Fahrenheit, making Venus the hottest planet in the solar system. Venus is so inhospitable that neither humans nor spacecraft are able to survive the planet's surface.

But some scientists speculate that Venus wasn't always so unwelcoming. From roughly 2.9 billion to 715 million years ago, global temperatures on Venus may have been just a few degrees cooler than Earth's are today. And scientists theorize that the surface may have contained shallow oceans that could have held enough water to support life.

(Bright instrumental music) Today, life may still exist in Venus' atmosphere. About 30 miles up in Venus' clouds, where the temperature and surface pressure are similar to those on the surface of Earth, scientists have observed strange dark streaks that appear to be absorbing ultraviolet radiation. A phenomenon that could be evidence of microbial life.

Life may struggle to survive in the atmosphere of Venus, but it is this unforgiving environment that's made Venus an icon of beauty. It reflects 70% of all the sunlight that reaches the planet, which is why Venus shines more brightly than any other planet or star in the night sky.

While more than 40 unmanned spacecraft have visited this infernal world, Venus, so illuminated in the darkness of space, still has much to reveal.

More Articles

View All
Hear Kids' Honest Opinions on Being a Boy or Girl Around the World | National Geographic
Um, my name is Hil Kack. I’m 9 years old, and I’m 9 years old. The best thing about being a boy is like a boy, being very sporty. The best thing about being a girl is because girls can do a little bit more things than boys. [Music] The best thing about …
Plesiosaurs 101 | National Geographic
(water splashes) (ominous music) [Narrator] Sea monsters are considered to be mythical creatures at the center of tall tales. (lighting crackling) But science tells a story of real-life monsters lurking in Earth’s prehistoric seas, monsters called plesi…
What Causes The Northern Lights?
[Applause] Welcome to Alaska! I’m just outside of Fairbanks, and I’m trying to find the Northern Lights, the Aurora Borealis. But the conditions haven’t been ideal because tonight it’s a bit cloudy, a bit hazy, and we’ve got a moon out which is nearly ful…
Reflecting points across horizontal and vertical lines
We’re asked to plot the image of point A under a reflection across the line L. So we have our line L here, and we want to plot the image of point A under reflection across line L. Well, one way to think about it is: point A is exactly one, two, three, fou…
Surveying The Angolan Highlands | National Geographic
We were expecting a river here and we didn’t find one. In 2015, a group of scientists began a comprehensive survey of the little known Angolan highlands. The plan was to travel thousands of kilometers down river from the source lakes to Botswana’s Okavang…
Why Trees Are Out to Get You
This video is part of what is potentially the largest collaboration ever on YouTube, along with my friends Mr. Beast and Mark Rober, Destin from Smarter Every Day, and many, many others. We’re trying to get 20 million trees planted before the end of this …