Computer simulations have shown that even less than a billion years ago, a vast ocean of water could splash on the surface of Venus.
Modern Venus bears little resemblance to a place where liquid water can exist: the temperature on the hot greenhouse effect planet is so high that even some metals melt. However, this was not always the case. In the distant past, Venus could boast of a much milder climate, and computer simulations of its evolution showed that it could even splash on an ocean of water. This is covered in an article published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.
It is worth remembering that another mystery of Venus is its rotation around its axis. It is directed in the opposite direction, in comparison with other planets of the solar system, and happens unusually slowly - a day here lasts about 116 of ours. It is believed that this was not always the case, and Venus was slowed down either by a cosmic catastrophe, or by the gravitational interaction of its dense atmosphere with a rather close Sun.
Last year, astronomers showed that if Venus rotated at the same speed in the past, then its climate has changed relatively recently - and only 715 million years ago, the average temperature here could have been about 15 ° C, compared to 460 ° C today. In their new work, Arnaud Salvador and colleagues at the University of Paris-South XI conducted computer simulations of young Venus, examining the interactions between its incandescent surface, the forming atmosphere and the Sun.
By varying various parameters, the scientists showed that the slow rotation of Venus could stimulate the formation of clouds and maintain a moderate temperature. Provided that the atmosphere of the planet then contained the same amount of carbon dioxide as it does today, there could be an ocean on its surface with a mass of about 10 percent of the mass of the Earth's oceans. If some other conditions were met - in particular, reaching a certain level of cloudiness - the size of the ocean could reach 30 percent of the earth's. It remains to think: could not life exist on young Venus?..
Sergey Vasiliev