If you have Venus in mind you will know for yourself that this is not a nice place in the space by our human standards. For a planet named after the Goddess of Beauty it's a lot like a sewer in hell. Yet it would not always be this way.
In a recent study, a team of scientists formulated the hypothesis that Venus was habitable and hosted life and oceans of water in liquid form, until a mysterious planetary catastrophe that occurred about 700 million years ago.
We believe Venus has had a stable climate for billions of years.
Michael Way, Goddard Institute Research Center, NASA, in a recent statement
"A catastrophic event would be responsible for its transformation of Venus from a habitable Earth-like planet into the uninhabitable hell,” Way said in a recent speech.
The research
Presented last week atEPSC-DPS Joint Meeting 2019 of Geneva, this study brings together two previous publications made by Michael Way and his team, with various models attached and different topographies of how Venus would have been before the disaster.
It is clear that absolute certainty is lacking, otherwise it wouldn't be a hypothesis, but the mathematical models used support the hypothesis of a habitable planet with oceans, tectonic plates and an exceptionally stable temperate climate between 20 and 40 degrees Celsius. A very long period of stability, the researchers think: up to 3 billion years.
On Venus something must have happened which released large quantities of gas into the atmosphere which was not reabsorbed.
Michael Way, Goddard Institute Study Center, NASA
Until the disaster
The period of "peace" ended, as mentioned, about 700 million years ago. From that moment on, an incredible "greenhouse effect" keeps an atmosphere saturated with hydrogen and carbon dioxide suffocated, which makes the temperature incandescent.
“The only remotely similar example known on earth was the creation of the Siberian trap, 500 million years ago. An event linked to a mass extinction, but not on this scale. The event that occurred on Venus literally transfigured the planet,” says Way.
