It’s often called Earth’s twin because they have similar sizes and structures.
But don’t let that fool you: Venus is a hell of a lot different from our home planet.
It spins backwards, so the Sun rises in the west and sets in the east.
It has a super thick atmosphere that’s mostly carbon dioxide, which traps heat like crazy and makes Venus the hottest planet in the solar system.
The surface temperature is about 470 degrees Celsius, which is hot enough to melt lead.
And the air pressure is 90 times higher than on Earth, so you’d be crushed like a soda can if you tried to land there.
Not to mention the clouds of sulfuric acid that smell like rotten eggs and rain down acid rain.
You’d think that with all that heat and pressure, something would give.
But, it turns out that Venus has some ways of coping with its extreme environment.
One of them is its strong ionosphere, which is a layer of electrically charged particles in the upper atmosphere.
The ionosphere acts like a shield against the solar wind, which is a stream of charged particles from the Sun that can strip away a planet’s atmosphere.
Venus doesn’t have a magnetic field like Earth does, but it has an induced magnetic field that forms when the solar wind interacts with the ionosphere.
This protects Venus from losing too much of its atmosphere to space.
Another way that Venus deals with its heat and pressure is by having a lot of volcanic activity.
It has more volcanoes than any other planet in the solar system, and some of them may still be active today.
Volcanoes can release heat and gas from the interior of the planet, which can help regulate the temperature and pressure.
Volcanoes can also reshape the surface of Venus, which is mostly covered by plains of solidified lava.
In fact, Venus has very few impact craters compared to other rocky planets, because its volcanoes and atmosphere erase most of the traces of asteroid collisions.