What makes venus the brightest planet

It only appears so bright because it is so close to the Earth, at least on the space scale. So why is the surface of Venus so reflective you may wonder? The reason is that it is covered in highly reflective clouds composed of sulfuric acid and acidic crystals mixed in with other gases. These are very effective at reflecting incoming sunlight back into outer space. Copyright Tucson News Now. All rights reserved. Skip to content. Vaccine Tracker. Monsoon TEP Solar Dashboard.

Scientists are so far unable to explain why these streaks remain stubbornly intact, even amid hurricane-force winds. They also have the odd habit of absorbing ultraviolet radiation. The most likely explanations focus on fine particles, ice crystals, or even a chemical compound called iron chloride. Although it's much less likely, another possibility considered by scientists who study astrobiology is that these streaks could be made up of microbial life, Venus-style.

These handy chemical cloaks would also absorb potentially damaging ultraviolet light and re-radiate it as visible light. There is much, it would seem, that she can teach us. Our nearness to Venus is a matter of perspective. The planet is nearly as big around as Earth — 7, miles 12, kilometers across, versus 7, miles 12, kilometers for Earth. 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. Venus takes Earth days to rotate on its axis, which is by far the slowest of any of the major planets.

And, because of this sluggish spin, its metal core cannot generate a magnetic field similar to Earth's. The magnetic field of Venus is 0. If viewed from above, Venus rotates on its axis in a direction that's the opposite of most planets'. That means on Venus, the sun would appear to rise in the west and set in the east.

On Earth, the sun appears to rise in the east and set in the west. The Venusian year — the time it takes to orbit the sun — is about Earth days long. Normally, that would mean that days on Venus would be longer than years. However, because of Venus' curious retrograde rotation, the time from one sunrise to the next is only about Earth days long. The last time we saw Venus transit in front of the sun was in , and the next time will be in The very top layer of Venus' clouds zips around the planet every four Earth days, propelled by hurricane-force winds traveling roughly mph kph.

This superrotation of the planet's atmosphere, some 60 times faster than Venus itself rotates, may be one of Venus' biggest mysteries. The clouds also carry signs of meteorological events known as gravity waves , caused when winds blow over geological features, causing rises and falls in the layers of air.

The winds at the planet's surface are much slower, estimated to be just a few miles per hour. Unusual stripes in the upper clouds of Venus are dubbed "blue absorbers" or "ultraviolet absorbers" because they strongly absorb light in the blue and ultraviolet wavelengths. These are soaking up a huge amount of energy — nearly half of the total solar energy the planet absorbs. As such, they seem to play a major role in keeping Venus as hellish as it is. Their exact composition remains uncertain; Some scientists suggest it could even be life , although many things would need to be ruled out before that conclusion is accepted.

The Venus Express spacecraft, a European Space Agency mission that operated between and , found evidence of lightning on the planet, which formed within clouds of sulfuric acid, unlike Earth's lightning, which forms in clouds of water. Venus' lightning is unique in the solar system.

Although Mercury was close enough to the Sun and small enough that its atmosphere was fully stripped away long ago, Venus was more distant and more massive, and managed to hold onto its more massive molecular species, particularly its carbon dioxide. An infrared view of Venus' night side, by the Akatsuki spacecraft. Its brightness is greater than At its nearest, it appears the largest in the sky of all the planets; at its most distant, numerous other planets can appear larger.

However, Venus is always the brightest. The multiple thick layers of sulfuric acid clouds play a tremendous role in pushing Venus to its extremes. This cloud cover winds up playing a vital role in the brightness of Venus as seen from Earth as well. The Soviet Union's series of Venera landers are the only spacecraft to ever land and transmit data The longest-lived of all the landers exceeded the two-hour mark before the instruments overheated and contact was lost. To date, no spacecraft has survived for longer on the Venusian surface, where temperatures reach degrees Fahrenheit C.

Saturn is many times fainter than Jupiter, despite being almost the same size and nearly the same reflectivity: a function of its much greater distance both from the Sun and from Earth. Venus, meanwhile, is 63, times brighter than the faintest planet, Neptune. This is where things start to get interesting. There are two types of albedo that scientists talk about:.

Bond albedo , which is the ratio of the total reflected radiation compared to the total incoming solar radiation, and. Geometric albedo , which is how much light actually gets reflected compared to a flat, ideally reflective surface. By both measures, Venus is by far the most reflective planet in the Solar System, with albedos that are each more than double the next closest planet.