Exciting Updates About Venus and Its Atmosphere: Could Life Have Come From Earth?

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Hello wonderful person. This is Anton and today we're going to discuss Venus and mostly because in just a few months from when I'm making this video, there's supposed to be another mission. The mission referred to as Lifefinder. In this case, involving the Venus atmospheric probe that you see right here that's going to slowly descend into Venian atmosphere for the first time in the last four decades. which means that it's about time we've discussed this beautiful planet once again and talked about some of the more unal discoveries in the last few months. And so despite Mars getting most of the attention in space exploration, there have been some remarkable discoveries from Venus that are slowly changing how we understand our neighbor just a little bit and specifically discoveries from its surface and in regards to its vulcanism and some of its unusual atmospheric mysteries, one of which has now been solved. But I guess first very briefly, so why is Venus so difficult to study?

[00:00:56]And why don't we actually have a lot more missions landing on this planet?

[00:01:00]And well, as you probably know, it's really because of the extremes on its surface. Compared to all other terrestrial planets, Venus is just extremely difficult for any modern equipment. For example, it has a surface temperature of nearly 470 C and the atmospheric pressure at least 92 times greater than Earth. equivalent to approximately 1 kilometer in depth in the ocean. It's also a little bit weird for many other reasons, including a phenomenon referred to as super rotation. Here, the atmosphere seems to circle the planet in just four Earth days. But the planet itself rotates very slowly, taking 243 days to complete one turn, which creates a lot of powerful winds in the upper atmosphere and a lot of other extreme conditions that basically make landing on this planet extremely challenging. But nevertheless, despite of this, by using all sorts of observations in the last few years, scientists have finally identified the source of Venus's enigmatic lower haze.

[00:02:01]This was recently explored in a study you can find any description. But in a nutshell, for over half a century, we've known about this layer of particles below the main clouds that created this bizarre haze, making everything extremely difficult to see. But exactly how it formed was a bit of a mystery, mostly because none of the other planets seem to have this. And so in this recent study from Tohoka University, researchers announced that using advanced modeling, they were able to show that this haze is actually formed by the cosmic dust remnants of various meteors and meteorites. And of course, all of the dust coming from other planets. And [snorts] actually here quite a lot of this dust even comes from Mars. And so this cosmic dust or these remnants burn up in the atmosphere and then act as a kind of a seed for different types of cloud formation that increases cloud production by approximately 20 to 30%. Which is actually not so different from how a lot of clouds and a lot of rain is produced on Earth as well. Although in our case it's usually not from the cosmic dust but from the dust right here on the surface. But perhaps even more unexpectedly, the team also suggests that metallic elements in the dust, for example, iron, possibly act as the unknown UV absorbers that scientists have observed for several decades. Now, in some of the previous videos, we've actually talked about the potential explanation for this. And quite a few scientists possibly thought that maybe this was because of some kind of a bacteria living inside the clouds. But here this research provides us with a very interesting non-biological explanation for how some of these absorbers could actually have been formed by evaporating meteorites. And so in a nutshell, this one study seems to possibly solve several mysteries and explain the formation of hazes, formation of a lot of different clouds and of course the unusual absorbers detected over a decade ago. But when it comes to the atmosphere, we also have some insights on the Venian wind and specifically what drives those extreme winds and why they seem to move so fast.

[00:04:04]Now, previously it was believed that it was possibly because of unusual tides on the surface that the wind starts to move so fast. But a new analysis of 16 years of satellite data discovered that one of the main reasons planet's atmosphere seems to rotate 60 times faster than the planet itself is because of very specific thermal tides which are essentially these global scale atmospheric waves triggered by the sun's heating on the dayside atmosphere. And so as the sun hits these thick clouds and the air expands and moves, it creates cycles of pressure and motion starting with these very thick sulfuric acid clouds in the Venian upper atmosphere. And this heat then generates a lot of pressure and transfers angular momentum from the lower atmosphere to higher altitudes. And because this creates a kind of a constant influx, it continuously creates this pressure preventing the friction from the surface from stopping the winds. And so the winds in this case can actually maintain speeds of 100 m/s or over 220 mph. With all of this simply happening because Venus spins very very slow. And this model can now be used to try to model weather on other slowly rotating planets we discover across the galaxy. In other words, any planet rotating very slowly will probably have very similar extremely powerful winds. But apart from the atmosphere, there was also a really major discovery coming from the surface of Venus as well. This is from the study you see right here and it's based on the research from University of Tranto. Here by analyzing radar images from the Mellan mission, scientists accidentally identified a large subsurface conduit that basically resembles something like this. This is inside the region referred to as Nyx Mons. And as you can see from this image, this is not a small feature.

[00:05:52]It's approximately 3 km across and inside it seems to create a cave 1 kilometer in diameter with the void depth that's visible from space being about 375 m. And so right now scientists believe this is a telltale sign of a subsurface lava tube that's now been officially confirmed on the surface. In other words, this is a confirmation of very active and very violent volcanism that potentially still happens even today. But what's unusual about this discovery is actually the size. These dimensions are much larger than any lava tube on Earth or even the ones on Mars that has much lower gravity. As a matter of fact, this is on the upper end of what we've seen on the surface of the moon and suggests an incredibly powerful eruption and a [clears throat] very powerful lava tube. And this is of course important because it validates ideas about Venian volcanic history and provides potential targets for future missions like the NASA's Veritas and ISU's Envision. The missions that are going to be starting in the next few years. And because both missions will carry a radar, they'll be able to see these features in even higher resolution and possibly even tell us what's inside.

[00:07:04]But right now, scientists do believe that this tube probably expands for at least 45 km and may form an enormous cave system inside. And on top of this, we've also had certain investigations in regards to Venian weather and the overall changes in temperature and even various dust storms. For example, it turns out that winds in this case also regulate surface temperature and stabilize temperature differences. As a matter of fact, scientists discovered that a lot of mountainous regions on Venus seem to have an extremely stable temperature where the difference between day and night is less than 1° Kelvin.

[00:07:39]This is because the mountains on Venus create downs slope winds that counteract planet's cooling, keeping the temperature constant. In contrast, the lowlands do experience larger fluctuations, but it's only about 4°. In other words, Venus seems to be pretty much always hot and it also experiences dust storms, but on a surface, they're usually very slow. That's because it's extremely dense here. So, the air only moves with a speed of about 1 m/s. But this is enough energy to move a lot of particles. And so, the surface does experience a lot of storms, which might be a problem for a lot of future missions that are going to be landing on the surface. And that's of course something that hasn't happened since the Vanera missions launched by the Soviets.

[00:08:23]But when it comes to these future missions, the problem was always extreme temperatures. As a matter of fact, none of the probes so far survived for longer than a few hours. But based on some of the recent studies, there might be some chips now that can survive these extreme conditions. And so here, scientists from University of Southern California developed a new type of a computer chip that can function in extremely high temperatures exceeding 700 Celsius, 1300 F. Here this device is a memster a nanoscale component that can both store data and perform computations that solves many previous problems using a kind of a unique material sandwich.

[00:09:03]Basically it uses tungsten electrodes chosen for having the highest melting point halfum oxide ceramics that acts as a functional medium and a layer of graphine that acts as a barrier preventing tungsten atoms from migrating into the ceramics. And so here this is literally a processor that can work in vition conditions. Now nothing functional has been made out of this yet but this is definitely an intriguing proof of concept. Something you can learn about in the study in the description which brings us to the next question. So why is Venus the way it is?

[00:09:35]Why is it so different from Earth despite being relatively similar in size and mass? And here this is based on a study from University of Hong Kong that essentially classifies six distinct tectonic regimes for rocky planets. And Venus appears to operate under a newly identified episodic squishy lid regime.

[00:09:55]In this state, the planet's outer shell is weakened by magma and creates regional intermittent tectonic activity instead of a global tectonic movement like on our own planet. And so this framework explains why Venus has features like corona which are these massive circular fracture systems and why it surface appears to be roughly the same age everywhere potentially due to very catastrophic resurfacing events. Or just to rephrase this venian tectonics seem to be fundamentally different from planet earth. Now, exactly why this is so is of course unknown, but this of course has a lot of implication for other terrestrial planets and possibly explains why many of them evolve so differently. And finally, the last but not least is the idea of potential life on Venus. So, this is of course the most controversial topic, but we still have to talk about the possibility of life.

[00:10:46]And that's because while the surface is very hostile, if you go approximately 50 km up, you'll reach temperatures and pressures very similar to what we have on planet Earth. Which is why for many decades now, scientists have speculated on the potential existence of some kind of a aerial life that might exist in the Venian clouds. And a recent study presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference investigated the possibility that life, if it exists here, might have possibly come from Earth naturally through the process referred to as spenseria. And so, for example, impacts on Earth could have ejected materials containing microbial life, which would eventually reach Venus with the model suggesting that over the last billion years, up to 20 billion cells could have been transferred from Earth to the clouds of Venus through various meteorite collisions. And on average, a single bullet or a single asteroid could carry approximately 3,000 viable cells with at least 100 cells delivered every single year, at least mathematically and based on this model.

[00:11:49]And so in the last billion years, billion tons of material has been delivered from Earth without destroying its internal structure. But for these microbes to survive and to be successful, they have to be small enough to stay lofted in the clouds for at least several days. with simulations showing us that a fraction of this mass could technically reach the cloud layers where life could maybe then adapt and survive. In other words, if there is life on Venus, it could have basically come from here. And since Venian observations discovered even things like methane and more recently nitric oxide, a lot of these preliminary results suggest that inorganic activity is extremely unlikely to produce everything we observe. So there's still a bit of a hint that some of the stuff might be produced by living bacteria, but obviously this does not prove the existence of life there yet. It just provides us with some new things to look for in order to see if this is correct.

[00:12:43]Either way, this definitely confirms that this is a world filled with a lot of mysteries and a very complex geological history. But importantly, we now have at least couple of missions going there and hopefully one will start in just a few months. And so basically if everything goes right then sometimes in early 2027 the Venus Lifefinder might find something. Thank you for watching.

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