VENUS may once have been a pleasant place to live, scientists said yesterday.
Data from an orbiting European spacecraft show the planet is even more like a wayward twin of Earth than was previously realised.
Venus is the Earth's closest planetary neighbour. The two worlds are about the same size and occupy similar orbits,
although Venus is slightly closer to the Sun.
Billions of years ago, Venus would have had conditions very similar to those on Earth and may even have been habitable, scientists now believe.
But a runaway carbon dioxide greenhouse effect, atmospheric erosion by solar radiation, and a slower rotation rate sent Venus down a very different development path.
Today the planet is stripped of water, has a surface temperature hot enough to melt lead and is ravaged by hurricane-force winds and lightning storms.
The findings from the European Space Agency's Venus Express probe, which has been studying the planet for a year, offer a sobering view of how Earth might develop given catastrophic changes to its climate.
Professor Fred Taylor, of Oxford University's department of physics, one of the Venus Express mission leaders, said: "It is becoming clear why the climate on Venus is so different from the Earth when the planets themselves are otherwise quite similar.
"Our new data make it possible to construct a scenario in which Venus started out like the Earth, possibly with a habitable environment, billions of years ago."
The full article contains 248 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
