A very strange planet is Venus, but why?
We take yet another look at his planet.
More and more it is becoming obvious that both stars and planets have a need for an efficient, orderly mechanism of internal heat regulation, and discharge.
There is little doubt that for example a star, whose heat exchange mechanism is disrupted will likely go up in a flash or show extreme instability. But the same must be true of planets. If a planet’s heat exchange mechanism becomes inefficient then either the planet’s core will get too hot, or too cold and the planet becomes unstable or barren. On Mars we seem to be viewing a situation where the planet, for some unknown reason, lost its water, dried up and froze. It probably lost its atmosphere before those things happened, and in all probability lost its magnetic field before that happened. So the fact that a planet or moon has an atmosphere at all probably depends on many factors, and efficient heat discharge is probably an important aspect.
Something violent happened to Venus
On Venus we see something quite catastrophic taking place. The entire surface must have at one time been obliterated by forces deep within the planet. This is quite obvious since the planet has not recovered from those forces even now. Venus is a hell place with all kinds of fire and brimstone just about everywhere you look. Volcanoes spewing out massive amounts of lava, and a surface choked by an extremely oppressive atmosphere. Yet, the truth is that we don’t really know what came first, the chicken or the egg-did Venus’ atmosphere cause the eruptions from the core, or is Venus’ atmosphere being caused by the eruptions from the core? Or is one complimenting and reinforcing the other? This question will remain open until more is known about the planet itself. Still the questions have some real bearing on what we do here on Earth. Should it turn out that the atmosphere had in fact something to do with what we are seeing on Venus’ surface, it would give us very good reason to worry.
The planet is a misfit
Still this is all speculation. But speculation can often be of great value in that all ideas are modeled and the best perhaps can survive the test of time and truth.
We do know a few things about Venus’ and these are strange. The first is that Venus has the most perfect orbit of all the planets. It is nearly circular with hardly any flaws or eccentricities. This is odd. The fact is almost every other body in the solar system, be it moon, or planet, or comet, or asteroid seems to show some eccentricity in their orbit. But not Venus. She is a perfect little girl going around in a perfect circle. Why?
Another very strange thing about Venus is her -slightly- retrograde revolution. Of all the planets, only Venus has a retrograde motion around her axis, and is in fact one of only a few known bodies that has such retrograde revolution. Neptune’s moon is another. But Neptune’s moon has an eccentric orbit around its host planet. Which would be expected as the orbit would be expected to decay due to the drag caused by the retrograde revolution. But Venus orbit is not decaying at all. It’s perfectly circular. Why? Are these two strange characteristics related? Does the perfect orbit have anything to do with the slightly retrograde revolution around its axis? Was one force substituted for the sake of the other? Did Venus give up a pro-grade, normal revolution about its axis for the sake of a perfect orbit?
The Sun’s gravity will affect Venus’ rotation to some extent. It is near enough to the giant star to be affected. But it is not enough to explain a retrograde orbit. If anything Venus should have a tidally locked revolution which would be a pro-grade revolution. But it doesn’t. Does the Earth-moon double planet system affect her? It might slow her revolution down but cannot explain the retrograde motion either. Could Mercury affect Venus’ revolution? Probably not much because it is too small and too far away. So what could possibly cause this planet to turn the other way?
It shows no deformities in its orbit and that would have indicated a collision of some kind with another body. There is no such deformity at all in the orbit. It’s perfect.
Did Venus turn itself inside out?
Could the destruction we see on the surface have caused a retrograde motion?
It could under one condition. Experiments have indicated that the core of the Earth spins slightly faster than the surface. Now it is very slight on a yearly basis, but over billions of years, it will add up. Now if Venus had a core spinning in the direction of a pro grade revolution and for any reason it was stopped, we might expect a backlash. This could actually cause a slight retrograde motion to develop over many millions of years.
If the planet expanded due to heating at the core, which seems plausible enough, it would immediately experience a slow down due to the conservation of angular momentum. But this slow down would take place in regions close to the surface. While the core would actually continue to spin at its normal speed. The difference in speed between the surface regions and the core regions would increase. This would almost certainly lead to more heating at the core. Remember this is over millions of years. But slowly the core too would eventually be dragged to a slow down due to friction. But if indeed the planet was slowed down enough to actually stop at the surface due to both the conservation of angular momentum, and due to the increased drag of the Sun and Earth Moon system as the planet expanded, then the core would probably come to a stop after hundreds of millions of years. But after it stopped, it would have a brief period of backlash.
The likely reason to expect a backlash is that as the core and central regions of the planet experience a differential rotation relative to the regions closer to the surface, a certain stretching could occur. A certain sheer tension would occur between the core regions and the outer regions that over millions or billions of years would build to significant proportions with a significant potential energy-in the opposite direction of spin. We might come to think of the surface regions as literally wrapping themselves around the more highly compressed core, and if these regions are semi-molten, they might well be elastic to some degree. For as long as there exists a differential core spin over the surface regions this tension would increase, occasionally breaking as perhaps on Earth we see the formation of deep trenches and hot spots. But for the most part this tension would continue to increase for as long as there existed a differential, and this would probably exist for as long at the planet were revolving around its own axis due to both the differential pull of the Sun and the Earth moon system as these would tend to slow down the surface regions faster than the core regions. So over billions of years a potential energy would build up as the planets outer regions stretch over the core-in the opposite direction of rotation. Kind of like a baseball being wound with string over a hard wooden core-once an elastic potential energy is created, by stretching the strings too much, then there would exist a slight tendency for the core to unwind when the spinning stopped. This would force the core into a backlash, small but enough to cause a counter rotation in the opposite direction of the original winding. This may have happened to Venus.
All that tension in the opposite direction built up over billions of years would suddenly show up unimpeded when the core stopped spinning. The planet would unwind. The force on the core now would briefly go in the other direction. The planet would reverse direction. The surface would be obliterated due to the release of energy.
This would happen over hundreds of millions of years but slowly but surely it would happen if these phenomena are in fact present. This could actually explain the slight retrograde motion where not much else seems to. The idea that Venus was born with a retrograde motion is not likely. Again the tendency even if that were the case, would be for the planet to eventually go into a pro-grade revolution since the Sun would tend to lock it tidally. In the end very little else seems plausible. Of course there could well be other reasons that are not apparent here at this time, but for the moment it’s the only explanation that seems to have a chance at explaining this extremely peculiar motion of this planet with a nearly perfect orbit around the Sun.
Whatever happened to it, this is one strange planet
One thing is true about Venus and should not be contested much is that this planet is undergoing a cataclysm of some kind. What we see on its surface is not “normal”. After four billion years the planet should have cooled by now, as all the others have, and what we see on Venus is quite violent and quite related to the sub-surface regions. It is as if the core of the planet has invaded its surface. Was this due in some way to a global warming phenomenon? It could be. Again it should be said that planets, like stars are in great need of an efficient mechanism for discharging their core heat. Any disturbances in the heat discharge processes are not going to be good for the surface. A severe case of greenhouse warming could probably raise the temperature of the core itself over millions of years-starting first with the sub-surface regions closest to the surface.
All in all something terrible happened to this planet which seems a sister to our own. It begs the question as to why Venus is not a paradise, but instead the best example of what perdition might look like.