Venus: the diamond of the

solar system

When we think about planet Venus, nothing rough or gruff comes to our mind. While it is a paragon of beauty and iridescence, with soft and gentle yet bright light cutting across the cold void of space, even then it is not fully understood. Instead it has been thought of as a friendly neighbour smiling at us from across the window in his house. The splendid sight of the beautiful heavenly body and its elegant gait across the sky is a naked eye view — what we see  without the help of a pair of binoculars or telescope — which in fact is far from the gentle comfort that planet Venus offers at first sight. For sure, Venus is brighter than any other celestial object except the Sun and the Moon. It is even brighter than Sirius, the brightest of them all. Since antiquity Venus has been held in high esteem for its grace: the reason why it was named as the goddess of beauty and charm. Beginning with the Romans till are very own times, Venus has been equated with a young woman holding a mirror engrossed in her looks (Zohra in our culture). The planet remained shrouded in mystery until very recently when the space age helped unravel its long held secrets.The infatuation of the ancients with heavenly bodies developed gradually as a result of their need to interpret to meet religious as well as agricultural predictions. Initially they noticed that some of the bodies did not stay put but moved amongst the fixed stars. For reasons of purity and awe, they named them after gods. For instance, Mercury as the messenger of gods for its rapid movement across the sky in its orbit around the sun; Venus for its glowing beauty; the Earth being the Mother goddess (Gaia) providing sustenance to all; Mars the red planet representing war and (to some) pestilence; Jupiter, the ruler of the mythical Olympus and the god King; Saturn as the god of (bountiful) harvest. There the Solar System ended. For it would be left to the telescope to discover the rest of the planets (Uranus in 1781; Neptune, after a prolonged research in 1846 and Pluto in 1930). So far it was necessary to go over the details of ancient history of planets so that the ‘new’ findings may reveal in absolute clarity how different are the thoughts and conclusions of the ancient people from those of ours. While their findings lead to astrology, those of our age are not conjunctures but based on pure science. Before you expend your resources on astrology or horoscope, consider the difference before you end up squandering them! Coming back to Venus, we must remove one anomaly, or erroneously held belief that the Earth and Venus are some sort of twins or resemble one another strongly. For sure they are both rocky (or terrestrial that is, Earth-like with dry and firm ground: terra firma) and almost equal in size in that Venus is 95 per cent of the diameter of the Earth (12,070 km to Earth’s 12,757). Any likeness ends there.Prior to 1962 almost nothing was known about the surface conditions on Venus. Conjuncture reigned supreme. The planet remained shrouded in mystery despite observation by telescope for three centuries. It’s still a mystery for instance; we know what it is like, but not why. The planet has layer upon layer of dense cloudy atmosphere which hides it surface completely defying any attempt at analysing it. Also, the cloud cover never once clears away so that when we observe Venus we see nothing but upper part of clouds which is very bright for the brilliant sunlight bombarding it perpetually — hence the iridescence and deceptive yet sublime beauty. Before the advent of space probes it was assumed that the clouds protected Venus from the searing Solar heat and that the planets surface was calm and friendly. Even the existence of an ocean or two was considered a possibility. Its surface was supposed to be possessing the conditions as were present on planet Earth some 200 million years back: teaming with primitive life forms in forests and swamps besides early vegetations of the carboniferous era. A few astronomers towards the middle of the last century when knowledge about Venus was sketchy and prone to conjuncture, held the opinion that the planet once harboured life — somewhat similar to Earth’s — but it vanished as a result of over pollution, erosion and heavy accumulation of carbon dioxide (CO2) in its volatile atmosphere. They ignored the fact that lies to close to the sun for comfort. It was established as far back as 1932 and then thanks to the development of space age in the 1960s and later, that the pure white face of planet Venus was nothing but deception for the major constituents of its atmosphere is the heavy gas CO2 and the surface was confirmed as scorching hot and windy with not a drop of water or moisture of the benign kind. And the surface temperature in the order of 500 degrees centigrade is easily enough to boil lead. As if that was not enough to cause a dent in the image held by the humans for thousands of years, the dense atmosphere weighs down on the planet with a pressure 90 times more than the Earth’s surface. Smitten human beings standing alone unprotected on the rocks strewn surface of Venus would be immediately, and simultaneously roasted, crusted to mince and asphyxiated. What should have been understood or ‘surmised’ in the bygone centuries is the fearfully small distance of Venus from the mighty inferno, the Sun: for at 39 million kilometres nothing can survive the unearthly heat, terrible radiation and other forms of cosmic bombardment. There is much more to Venus then already stated. For the rest, let us wait for the next issue!

The writer is a professional astronomer and a former head of PIA Planetaria. He can be reached at astronomerpreone@hotmail.com