The next Venus missions will tell us about worlds that live in other places
As our exoplanet continues to accumulate discoveries (and we’ve seen it More than 11,000 exoplanets so far) we need to know if an Earth-sized planet looks like Earth or looks like Venus. “We don’t know which of these results is expected or likely,” says Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at North Carolina State University. And to know that we need to understand Venus much better.
Most scientists would agree that all living exoplanets would need water.
With surface temperatures of 471 ° C and 89 times worse than Earth’s, it seems impossible for water to be on Venus. But Venus and Earth are the same size, the same age, and we think it is best that they are made of comparable materials and were born with very similar initial conditions. Venus is 30% closer to the sun than the Earth, which is very noticeable, but not absolute. And yet, after 4.5 billion years, these two planets have become very diffe