Venus is our beautiful sister planet. She reigns supreme In the evening and the morning sky. Being between us and the Sun, she can never be far from the Sun, so as the evening wears on and night comes, she sinks gracefully beneath the western horizon. In the morning she reappears before dawn and resumes her reign as the queen of the skies until the strong light of the rising Sun obliterates her. Her brilliance has led us to suspect that she was probably the “star of Bethlehem.”
Even in broad daylight Venus’ path across the sky may be detected with the naked eye when conditions are favorable. She is 66 ½ million miles from the Sun. Except for our own Moon, she is our nearest celestial neighbor. She is not yet locked fast to the Sun and hence has days and nights as we have them on Earth. However, there is enough "locking" effect to make her days and nights several of our weeks long. We cannot observe her axial revolution because she is perpetually bathed in clouds. The days being weeks long and her distance from the Sun being rather small, she must become steaming hot under her blanket of humid clouds during the long days. As the nights are equally long, she has time to radiate this heat, and before the long nights are over, she must become freezing cold. It is likely that during the long nights the temperature descends as low as 13 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
Since Venus is perpetually bathed in clouds, we know she has an atmosphere. This might be expected because Earth has an atmosphere: Venus is almost the same size as Earth and hence has enough gravitational pull to hold the gases of an atmosphere.
Unfortunately for any kind of life such as we know on Earth, there is a great shortage of oxygen on Venus' This means that the oxidizing processes that are the basis of vegetable and animal life on Earth cannot prevail on Venus. However, there are other chemical combinations which are able to produce energy and build material structures, and it is conceivable that a form of life may exist there that can do without oxygen, or, indeed, make its own oxygen, and also is able to withstand the roasting days and the freezing nights. If it were the case that the surface of Venus is principally water, it could be that life might have gained-a foothold and have developed into an aquatic creature which migrates, following a zone of comfortable temperature. This creature might even be an intelligent one. We have not one scrap of evidence of the existence of life on Venus, but we have as yet no means of looking for it, and so we may not positively say either that there is none or that there is some. We have never seen its surface because of the perpetual clouds. The distance from Earth to Venus, when we are both on the same side of the Sun and nearly in line, is only about 26 million miles. That is very near indeed, as cosmic distances go. Our own Moon is a bit under a quarter of a million miles away. Venus has a diameter of about 7,680 miles, only slightly smaller than Earth. She swings along on her orbit around the Sun at something like 78,000 miles per hour.
©2013
W0IS.com
Copyright and Privacy Notice