Venus

Venus is the second planet from the Sun and Earth's closest planetary neighbor. Often called Earth's 'sister planet' due to their similar size and mass, Venus is actually a radically different world. Its thick carbon dioxide atmosphere creates a runaway greenhouse effect that makes it the hottest planet in the solar system, with a near-uniform surface temperature of about 462°C -- hot enough to melt lead. The atmospheric pressure at the surface is a crushing 92 times that of Earth. Venus rotates backward compared to most planets (retrograde rotation), and it does so extremely slowly -- one Venusian day lasts 243 Earth days, which is actually longer than its year of 225 Earth days. This means the Sun rises in the west and sets in the east on Venus. The planet's surface, hidden beneath perpetual clouds of sulfuric acid, was mapped by radar from the Magellan spacecraft in the early 1990s, revealing a landscape of vast volcanic plains, highland regions, and thousands of volcanoes, some of which may still be active. Venus is the brightest natural object in Earth's night sky after the Moon, earning it the names 'Morning Star' and 'Evening Star' since ancient times. Despite its hellish conditions, some scientists have proposed that microbial life could potentially exist in the more temperate upper cloud layers, where temperatures and pressures are more Earth-like. In 2020, a controversial detection of phosphine gas in Venus's atmosphere sparked renewed interest in this possibility.