Around 4.5 billion years ago, Earth and Venus were born in the middle of a chaotic star system. The neighboring worlds were of the same size and similar structure, it is thought that both planets probably started out with similar amounts of water. Today, however, Venus is a hellish world with intense heat and crushing pressure, and most of its water is gone.
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Scientists aren’t sure how it became an intense desert planet, but new research suggests the culprit may be a particular type of molecule escaping into space and draining Venus of the last of its water.
A group of planetary scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder investigated the chemical reactions taking place in the atmosphere of Venus using computer models and found that a molecule called HCO+ (an ion composed of a hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen atom) is probably responsible for the arid conditions of Venus. recommendations were published this week in the magazine Nature.
“The surface of Venus is as hot as a pizza oven,” Eryn Cangi, a research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric Studies and Space Pysics (LASP) and co-lead author of the new paper, told Gizmodo. “Venus and Mars are two possible ends of the planetary habitability spectrum. “We know Earth is habitable, Venus is too hot, and Mars is too cold, but they both lost water.”
Early in Venus’ history, the planet may have lost much of its water due to atmospheric escape. The Sun is constantly expelling water. The solar wind, a stream of charged particles, throughout the solar system and beyond the planets. Earth is lucky to have a magnetic field that protects it from the solar wind, while Venus is hit by it. As a result, scientists think Venus lost some of its water to the solar wind hitting its upper atmosphere, causing water molecules to escape over the 4.5 billion years since the planet’s birth.
This process can remove much of the water, but it does not take into account how much water Venus has lost until today. I throw away my water bottle, I get rid of most of the water, but there are still some drops in there,” Cangi said. . “Today we see such a low amount of water on Venus that it doesn’t quite match.”
The process by which Venus lost the rest of its water, and continues to lose the last remaining bits of the precious liquid to this day, has baffled scientists for years. The new study suggests that Venus is losing water through a mechanism called dissociative recombination, by which HCO+ ions mix with water and form a positively charged molecule. Since opposites attract, the molecule will attract a negatively charged electron and they will combine.
However, once they do, the resulting molecule has too much energy to stay together and therefore breaks apart. The hydrogen will escape. from the planet’s atmosphere because it gained too much energy from the bonding and disintegration process. “That’s just a basic chemical reaction, so that could have been happening early on Venus, but it continues to this day, removing the last of that water,” Cangi said.
It is important to note that the study did not directly detect HCO+ in Venus’ atmosphere; Previous missions to the neighboring planet lacked the instruments designed to search for the molecule in the atmosphere. However, data from previous missions showed evidence of some of the molecules reacting to form HCO+.
Upcoming missions to Venus, such as VERITAS and DAVINCI, will also not be equipped with the proper instruments, so the scientists behind the new study are suggesting a new mission to Venus that will measure the molecules in its upper atmosphere.
“We like to say in science that all models are wrong to some extent, but some are useful,” Cangi said. “A mission like that would really complement the next series of Venus missions to help us complete the picture of water escaping from Venus.”
Further: The 7 strangest things about Venus, the planet from hell
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