venus

Venus rotates in the opposite direction of every other planet in the solar system, and it does so so slowly that a single Venusian day lasts 243 Earth days — longer than its year of 225 days. If you stood on Venus, the Sun would rise in the west and set in the east, and by the time it crossed the sky, you would have already lapped the planet in its orbit. Two competing theories — a primordial giant impact and the slow grind of atmospheric tides — argue over how a world ended up this strange, and neither has yet won.

Venus has almost no impact craters. That fact alone reveals something extraordinary about its past — and a 2023 re-analysis of 30-year-old radar images just caught its volcanoes in the act.

Venus has a surface pressure 92 times Earth's, clouds made of sulfuric acid, and a surface hot enough to melt lead — yet something in its middle cloud deck may have hinted at life. Explore the chemistry behind the solar system's most hostile atmosphere and the missions racing to decode it.