Oceans May Have Once Graced Venus Before It Became a Hell Planet - ScienceAlert

A new study has found that if Venus ever did have habitable conditions, and liquid water on its surface, it was a long time ago, and lasted only briefly before the planet transformed into the parched, arid world it is today.

Earlier in the history of the Solar System, when the Sun was less powerful, Venus may have been more temperate, with lakes and oceans of liquid water.

If the planet ever did have a liquid ocean, that water would have evaporated into the atmosphere as Venus heated up, breaking up into hydrogen and oxygen via photodissociation, a chemical reaction triggered by sunlight.

Rather, the oxygen seemed most likely to suffer one of two fates: to leak out into space, or become sequestered in oxidizable magma, such as basalt, on the planet's surface.

But the magnitude of Venus' past volcanic activity can be constrained by the amount of radioactive argon still present in the planet's atmosphere.

So the results reconcile the lack of oxygen in Venus' current atmosphere with potential early habitable conditions, but the loophole, the researchers say, is a narrow one.