A new study showed that Venus could not always be deprived of water by hell. The latest modeling showed that oceans could have existed on it three billion years ago. There was already life on Earth at that time.
Oceans on Venus
Scientists from the University of Chicago proved that water on Venus could exist for a fairly long period of time. For this, they took the current state of its atmosphere, which consists of carbon dioxide, and used it in a computer model simulating the process of evaporation of water over billions of years.
The basis of the model was the idea that at the dawn of the existence of the Solar System on Venus there was an ocean. The researchers chose three different points to start the evaporation process and set different water level options for each of them.
A total of 94,080 different simulations were released. At the same time, only a few dozen of them at the end showed a result that would resemble the current state of the planet’s atmosphere. The most interesting thing is that in these variants, the oceans on Venus have been preserved for a long time. In some of them, they finally disappeared only 3 billion years ago, when life already existed on Earth.
History of ideas about Venus
The theory of the existence of oceans on Venus has a long-standing origin. It began when astronomers discovered that it was covered with a thick layer of clouds. This gave rise to the theory that there was a lot of water on it and, as a result, there was a global ocean.
This theory lasted almost until the 1970s, when automatic stations confirmed what researchers had suspected for a long time. The atmosphere of Venus is extremely dense, hot and poisonous. Clouds consist of sulfuric acid, and there is no water at all in any form.
Since then, all questions about the oceans of Venus remain quite marginal. Only recently researchers began to put forward theories that they could have existed at the very beginning of the history of the Solar System.
Bolder scientists assumed that they could have persisted during the first 700 million years, when the Sun’s luminosity was 30 percent lower than today’s.But the new study goes much further and shows that a billion years after the formation of the Solar System, there could be two or even three planets with oceans on it.
According to phys.org
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