Universe Today

Unfortunately, Venus doesn’t have rings. It also doesn’t have any moons; although, Venus might have had a moon in the past, but it probably crashed back into the planet billions of years ago.

For a planet to have rings, it must have formed further out in the Solar System, where water ice would be able to freeze into chunks of ice. It’s too warm around Venus, so that any water would be a gas or liquid. It would either collect into oceans, like Earth, or be pushed out into deeper space by the Sun’s solar wind.

Another way that planets can have rings is when micrometeoroids smash into a small moon. If the moon is really small, like Pluto’s moon Nix, material ejected from the meteoroid impact will just float off into space and form a ring around the planet. There are several moons around Saturn which create rings in this way, and scientists think that Pluto’s moons might form rings in the same way.

Sorry, no rings for Venus.

Saturn has rings and Jupiter has rings. Does Pluto have rings? Astronomers have no idea. Pluto is so far away that it’s impossible to get a clear view of Pluto from here on Earth.

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But scientists think that it’s possible that Pluto does have rings. This idea comes from the fact that Pluto has two tiny moons, Nix and Hydra. They’re just a few km across, and have very little gravity. So any micrometeoroid impacts on these moons will kick up material into orbit around Pluto.

Instead of falling back down onto the moons, this impact material would drift into rings around Pluto. Astronomers think it could actually survive for up to 100,000 years. This is a similar process that creates some of the rings around Saturn and Jupiter.

If this is true, it would constitute the first set of rings around a solid object (in this case a dwarf planet), rather than a gas giant planet.

When NASA’s New Horizons mission arrives at Pluto in 2015, it might be able to detect these faint rings, and confirm the theory.

The planet Earth has a slightly eccentric orbit. This means that its distance from the Sun can vary slightly as the Earth travels an elliptical path around the Sun. Pluto has an extremely elliptical orbit, varying its distance dramatically from the Sun dramatically.

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So the closest distance between the Earth and Pluto occurs when Earth is at its most distant from the Sun, and Pluto is at its closest. And the Sun, Earth and Pluto are lined up in a perfect line. When this happens, Pluto and Earth would be separated by 4.2 billion km.

At their most distant, Earth would be at its furthest at the opposite side of the Sun from Pluto. At this point, Earth and Pluto would be separated by 7.5 billion km.

And so, the distance from Earth to Pluto ranges between these two distances.

The surface of Venus is a hellish place, with vast regions shaped by volcanic activity. In fact, Venus has many more volcanoes than Earth. It has more than 150 regions across the planet shaped by volcanoes.

And from this, you would think that Venus is more volcanic than Earth, but actually, it’s just that the regions of volcanic activity weren’t covered up as they have been here on Earth. The surface of Earth is constantly reshaped by tectonic activity, where plates on the crust of the planet float atop a layer of magma. These plates can slide underneath one another, and any features on the surface are destroyed.

For some reason, plate tectonics on Venus stopped billions of years ago. Planetary scientists think that the high temperatures on Venus shut down the cycle of plate tectonics. Volcanic features created on the planet billions of years ago are still visible, while they would have been obscured long ago on Earth.

Scientists think there is still active volcanism on Venus.

There are more than 1,000 impact craters on Venus, distributed across the planet. While craters are eroded here on Earth, they’re still in pristine condition on Venus. The craters range in size from 3 km to 280 km in diameter.

Of all the planets in the Solar System, Venus has a unique rotation. Seen from above, all of the planets rotate in a counter-clockwise direction. And this is what you would expect if all the planets formed from the same planetary nebular billions of years ago.

And yet, the rotation of Venus is clockwise, what astronomers call “retrograde”. Venus rotates backwards. Of course, since the length of a day on Venus is longer than a year, this rotation happens very slowly.

Why does Venus rotate backwards? One possibility is that Venus rotated normally when it first formed from the solar nebula, and then the tidal effects from its dense atmosphere might have slowed its rotation down.

Another theory is that a series of gigantic impacts early on in Venus’ history might have stopped or even reversed its rotation altogether. A similar impact happened to Earth billions of years ago, which formed the Moon.

The diameter of Venus is 12,100 km. That is 95% of the diameter of Earth. There are many similarities between the two planets, but there are many more extreme differences.

Venus and Earth are two of the four terrestrial planets in our Solar System. Mercury and Mars are the other two. Venus has a surface gravity that is 8.87 m/s² or 90% of the gravity here on Earth. The planet has 86% of the volume that Earth has along with 82% of the mass. The planet’s density is nearly identical at 5.243 g/cm³. The similarities end there.

The average surface temperature of Venus is about 9 times higher than it is on Earth. It is 462°C there and the hottest deserts on Earth rarely see 50°C. The atmospheric pressure at surface level is 92 times greater than it is here, while the atmosphere itself contains 96% carbon dioxide. If a human managed to survive the pressure and could find a supply of oxygen, there is the sulfuric acid droplets and clouds along with heavy amounts of volcanic ash that are floating in the ”air”.

Like Earth, Venus has a magnetic field that protects it from the solar wind. Unlike Earth, its magnetic field is not created by a dynamo effect. In order for a planet to create its own magnetic field in this way, it has to have a liquid core that is spinning and the ability to release heat through convection. Venus is not capable of convection because the surface was nearly covered in lava between 300 and 500 million years ago. When that lava hardened it prevented the possibility of tectonic action and heat convection. The Venusian magnetic field is created by an interaction of the solar wind and the ionosphere of the planet. This reaction creates a weaker field than the one on Earth, so the planet is susceptible to cosmic radiation.

The entire diameter of Venus is covered in volcanoes and the remnants of volcanoes. There are 1,000 of them that are over 20 km in diameter scattered among thousands of smaller ones. There are some large impact craters, but no small ones. Any small meteorites would burn up in the thick atmosphere.

That is a lot of information to throw at you. Again, the diameter of Venus is 12,100 km and is very close to that of Earth. Hopefully, you found all of the information that you need and good luck with any further research you need to do.

We have written many articles about Venus for Universe Today. Here’s an article about the atmosphere of Venus, and here’s an article about how far Venus is from the Sun.

If you’d like more information on Venus, check out Hubblesite’s News Releases about Venus, and here’s a link to NASA’s Solar System Exploration Guide on Venus.

We’ve also recorded an entire episode of Astronomy Cast all about Venus. Listen here, Episode 50: Venus.

Reference:
NASA