• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Where Did Venus’s Water All Go? We Might Have An Idea

May 6, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Among its other hellish conditions, Venus is bone dry, despite having once had plenty of water. Where did it all go? A new analysis attributes it to “dissociative recombination”, which caused a loss of hydrogen atoms at twice the rate of previous estimates.

Advertisement

Science fiction writers once set their works in the oceans of Venus, which they imagined sat beneath those endless clouds. Once spacecraft checked our neighbor out, the horrifying heat made clear there’d be no liquid water – but where was all the water vapor? Scientists have continued to ponder why Venus is hot and dry, rather than hot and wet, and what the implications might be for planets with more hospitable temperatures.

Advertisement

Venus probably started out with a fairly similar amount of water to Earth. Yet it has a hundred-thousandth as much left, all of it in the atmosphere, rather than being distributed between ice, ocean, and air like Earth’s.

Once Venus had similar amounts of water to Earth. It must have gone somewhere.

Once Venus had similar amounts of water to Earth. It must have gone somewhere.

Image Credit: NASA

The turbocharged Greenhouse Effect on Venus would have boiled off its water, leading to the steam escaping. However, if steam loss was the whole story, water equivalent to a global layer 10-100 meters (33-330 feet) deep should have been left behind.

“As an analogy, say I dumped out the water in my water bottle. There would still be a few droplets left,” said Dr Michael Chaffin of the University of Colorado, Boulder in a statement. Chaffin is part of a team blaming the molecule HCO+, which they have already identified as a major culprit in Mars losing most of its water.

There’s evidence to support the confidence Venus once had Earth-like quantities of water. Deuterium (hydrogen’s isotope with one neutron) is less likely to escape than ordinary hydrogen, and the ratio of hydrogen to deuterium reveals how much was once present.

Advertisement

Whether there is a little H2O in Venus’s atmosphere or a lot, some of it combines with carbon dioxide at altitudes to produce HCO+. However, the upper atmosphere also has plenty of free electrons, which recombine with the HCO+, leaving carbon monoxide and hydrogen atoms.

As the lightest element, hydrogen escapes easily from small planets’ gravity when it doesn’t have a heavier partner to anchor it. Unlike helium, hydrogen bonds easily to other atoms, so in the normal course of events it stays home. HCO+ provides a stepping stone to hydrogen becoming free long enough to escape. In Venus’s case, Chaffin and co-authors think, so much escaped that there’s not enough left to make water, and the oxygen has to go bond with something else.

In order to explain Venus’s desiccated state, the team thinks there must have been a lot more HCO+ in its atmosphere than previously anticipated.

Once all the hydrogen is lost, the HCO+ will be gone, but the authors don’t think we’re there yet. They think it should still be possible to identify small amounts of the molecule to confirm their hypothesis. “One of the surprising conclusions of this work is that HCO+ should actually be among the most abundant ions in the Venus atmosphere,” Chaffin said.

Advertisement

Once HCO+ was included in the models, Chaffin and co-authors found the anticipated amount of water roughly matches what we see today, and the hydrogen/deuterium ratio is in the right ballpark as well.

None of the spacecraft we have sent to Venus have detected any HCO+. However, the team thought that is because the instruments they carried were not suited to finding it.

The forthcoming Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (DAVINCI) won’t change that, but if this explanation is judged plausible future missions might. Much more than our understanding of Venus rests on this.

“There haven’t been many missions to Venus,” study co-author Dr Eryn Cangi said. “But newly planned missions will leverage decades of collective experience and a flourishing interest in Venus to explore the extremes of planetary atmospheres, evolution and habitability.”

Advertisement

“Water is really important for life,” Cangi added. “We need to understand the conditions that support liquid water in the universe, and that may have produced the very dry state of Venus today.”

The study is published in the journal Nature.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Events leading up to the trial of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes
  2. “Man Of The Hole”: Last Known Member Of Uncontacted Amazon Tribe Has Died
  3. This Is What Cannabis Looks Like Under A Microscope – You Might Be Surprised
  4. Will Lake Mead Go Back To Normal In 2024?

Source Link: Where Did Venus’s Water All Go? We Might Have An Idea

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Reindeer Bring A Gift Greater Than Any Of Santa’s – Hope Of A Stable Climate
  • If Deep-Sea Pressure Can Crush A Human Body, How Do Deep-Sea Creatures Not Implode?
  • Meet Ned: The Lonely Lefty Snail Looking For Love
  • “America Will Lead The Next Giant Leap”: NASA Announces New Milestone In Hunt For Exoplanets
  • What Did Neanderthals Sound Like?
  • One Star System Could Soon Dazzle Us Twice With Nova And Supernova Explosions
  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version