FORBES - To paraphrase Winston Churchill, our sister planet Venus remains a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. Remarkably similar in size, mass, and bulk makeup, today, Earth and Venus couldn't be more different. Earth is an ecological utopia while Venus is a poster child for planetary desolation.
The conventional view is that Venus simply formed too close to our evolving yellow dwarf star to maintain liquid water at its surface. But in the last few decades, that view has come to be seen as simplistic. That’s because this explanation fails to adequately answer why Venus came to have surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead and atmospheric surface pressures ninety times that of Earth.
Even so, the authors of a new paper being published today in the journal Nature Astronomy argue that Venus remains crucial to understanding earth-mass and earth-like planets circling other stars.
In order to really understand how you obtain conditions which are suitable for life to form in the first place, you really need to understand the past the present and future of planets and how they evolve with time, Stephen Kane, the paper’s lead author and a planetary astrophysicist at the University of California, Riverside, told me via phone. That's why we argue that Venus is really the key to that because it shows an extremely different evolution from Earth, he says.