Venus as a bright star shining in the sky credit: British Astronomical Association. Venus is named after the Roman goddess of love and peace. She was associated with the metal copper from Cyprus, which was Aphrodite's birthplace , a flattish triangle, the number five, the colour blue, and the day Friday.
The Saxons used the name of their fertility goddess, Fria, which led to the English name of Friday, whereas the French name Vendredi indicates its Greek-Latin origin. Also she is said to be a daughter of Zeus or to have sprung from the foam of the sea. There are two versions of her birth.
In the first version told by Hesiod, she was older than the Olympians. When the Titan Cronus severed his father's Uranus genitals and flung them into the sea, the blood and semen caused foam to gather and float across the sea to the island of Cyprus.
There Aphrodite rose out of the sea from the foam hence her name came from the word aphros, which means foam. She had experienced no infancy or childhood; she came into existence as a fully grown, young woman. The Clam Shell Version.
In the second version told by Homer, she was known as the daughter of Zeus and the ocean nymph Dione. The Cherubs Version.
She was married to Hephaestus Vulcan and bore children but she did not attend to her domestic duties. In fact, she concentrated almost completely on extramarital affairs with gods and mortals. Here is a look at key facts about the planet Venus, based on information from the U. Venus spins from east to west, the opposite direction from all the other planets in our solar system aside from Uranus.
Venus also experiences the longest day of any planet in the solar system, taking Earth days to complete a rotation. Venus gets its name from the ancient Roman goddess of love and beauty. From Earth, Venus is the brightest object in the night sky after our own Moon. The ancients, therefore, gave it great importance in their cultures, even thinking it was two objects: a morning star and an evening star. At its nearest to Earth, Venus is some 38 million miles about 61 million kilometers distant.
One more trick of perspective: how Venus looks through binoculars or a telescope. The complete cycle, however, new to full, takes days, while our Moon takes just a month.
And it was this perspective, the phases of Venus first observed by Galileo through his telescope, that provided the key scientific proof for the Copernican heliocentric nature of the Solar System. Spending a day on Venus would be quite a disorienting experience — that is, if your ship or suit could protect you from temperatures in the range of degrees Fahrenheit Celsius. For another, because of the planet's extremely slow rotation, sunrise to sunset would take Earth days.
And by the way, the Sun would rise in the west and set in the east, because Venus spins backward compared to Earth. In winter, the tilt means the rays are less direct. No such luck on Venus: Its very slight tilt is only three degrees, which is too little to produce noticeable seasons.
A critical question for scientists who search for life among the stars: How do habitable planets get their start? The close similarities of early Venus and Earth, and their very different fates, provide a kind of test case for scientists who study planet formation. Similar size, similar interior structure, both harboring oceans in their younger days. Yet one is now an inferno, while the other is the only known world — so far — to play host to abundant life. The factors that set these planets on almost opposite paths began, most likely, in the swirling disk of gas and dust from which they were born.
Somehow, 4. Several might well have moved in closer, or farther out, as the solar system formed. If we could slice Venus and Earth in half, pole to pole, and place them side by side, they would look remarkably similar. Each planet has an iron core enveloped by a hot-rock mantle; the thinnest of skins forms a rocky, exterior crust. On both planets, this thin skin changes form and sometimes erupts into volcanoes in response to the ebb and flow of heat and pressure deep beneath.
Other possible similarities will require further investigation — and perhaps another visit to a planet that has hosted many Earth probes, both in orbit and briefly on the surface. Subduction is believed to be the first step in creating plate tectonics. Magellan saw a land of extreme volcanism. The orbiter saw a relatively young surface, one recently reshaped in geologic terms , and chains of towering mountains. The broiling surface of Venus has been a topic of heated discussion among planetary scientists.
Venus, the second planet from the sun , is named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty and is the only planet named after a female. Venus may have been named after the most beautiful deity of the pantheon because it shone the brightest among the five planets known to ancient astronomers.
In ancient times, Venus was often thought to be two different stars , the evening star and the morning star — that is, the ones that first appeared at sunset and sunrise. In Latin, they were respectively known as Vesper and Lucifer.
In Christian times, Lucifer, or "light-bringer," became known as the name of Satan before his fall. However, further observations of Venus in the space age show a very hellish environment.
This makes Venus a very difficult planet to observe from up close, because spacecraft do not survive long on its surface. Venus and Earth are often called twins because they are similar in size, mass, density, composition and gravity.
The interior of Venus is made of a metallic iron core that's roughly 2, miles 6, km wide. Venus' molten rocky mantle is roughly 1, miles 3, km thick. Venus' crust is mostly basalt, and is estimated to be 6 to 12 miles 10 to 20 km thick, on average. Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system. Although Venus is not the planet closest to the sun, its dense atmosphere traps heat in a runaway version of the greenhouse effect that warms Earth.
As a result, temperatures on Venus reach degrees Fahrenheit degrees Celsius , which is more than hot enough to melt lead. Spacecraft have survived only a few hours after landing on the planet before being destroyed. With scorching temperatures, Venus also has a hellish atmosphere , that consists mainly of carbon dioxide with clouds of sulfuric acid and only trace amounts of water.
Its atmosphere is heavier than that of any other planet, leading to a surface pressure that's over 90 times that of Earth — similar to the pressure that exists 3, feet 1, meters deep in the ocean.
Incredibly, however, is that early in Venus' history, the planet may have actually been habitable , according to models from researchers at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and other studies. Venus' surface is extremely dry. During its evolution, ultraviolet rays from the sun evaporated water quickly, keeping the planet in a prolonged molten state.
0コメント