Life on Venus may never have been possible - Space.com

Like all newborn planets, young Venus was extremely hot — far too toasty for liquid-water oceans.

The previous, life-friendly modeling work determined that the planet cooled down enough to host liquid surface water thanks in large part to clouds, which bounced a lot of solar radiation back into space.

In the new study, which was published online today (Oct. 13) in the journal Nature, scientists led by Martin Turbet, a postdoctoral researcher at the Geneva Astronomical Observatory in Switzerland, simulated the climate of ancient Venus using a new model.

Turbet and his team found that conditions on young Venus likely limited clouds to the planet's nightside, where they were worse than useless as far as the establishment of life is concerned.

So Venus never cooled down enough for rain to fall, and for rivers, lakes and oceans to form. .

"If the authors are correct, Venus was always a hellhole," astronomers James Kasting and Chester Harman, of Penn State University and NASA's Ames Research Center, respectively, wrote in an accompanying "News & Views" piece in the same issue of Nature.

More in-depth study of the Venusian surface could provide some clarity on the planet's ancient climate.

"On our planet, such rocks form by metamorphic processes (in which minerals change form without melting) that occur in the presence of liquid water," Kasting and Harman wrote.

But it may take a Venus lander to get a firm understanding of these intriguing features, Kasting and Harman wrote. .

"Exoplanets that orbit near the inner edge of the conventional habitable zone, where liquid water can exist on a planet’s surface, might not actually be habitable," the duo wrote.