Collisions with high-speed space rocks in Venus’s early history could have melted most of the planet’s mantle and driven any water into the atmosphere
Space
17 December 2021
Artist’s rendering of an early, large collision on Venus Southwest Research Institute/Simone Marchi
High-speed impacts on Venus early in its history could help explain why the planet isn’t habitable today.
It remains somewhat of a mystery why Venus and Earth took such divergent paths, despite being fairly similar in size at relatively similar distances from the sun. Various explanations, such as Venus never cooling enough to condense oceans, have previously been put forward.
Simone Marchi and Raluca Rufu at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, examined a different possibility. As material swirled around …