Why does Venus glow like a star? "Evening Star" - Venus

The planet closest to Earth and 2nd from the Sun. However, before the start of space flights, very little was known about Venus: the entire surface of the planet was hidden by dense clouds that did not allow it to be explored. These clouds are composed of sulfuric acid, which intensely reflect light.

Therefore, it is not possible to see the surface of Venus in visible light. The atmosphere of Venus is 100 times denser than Earth's and consists of carbon dioxide.

Venus is illuminated by the Sun no more than the Earth is illuminated by the Moon on a cloudless night.

However, the Sun heats the planet's atmosphere so much that it is constantly very hot - the temperature rises to 500 degrees. The culprit of such strong heating is Greenhouse effect, which forms the atmosphere from carbon dioxide.

History of discovery

Through a telescope, even a small one, you can easily notice and track the shift visible phase disk of the planet Venus. They were first observed in 1610 by Galileo. The atmosphere was discovered by M.V. Lomonosov on June 6, 1761, when the planet passed across the disk of the Sun. This cosmic event was previously calculated and was eagerly awaited by astronomers around the world. But only Lomonosov focused his attention on the fact that when Venus came into contact with the disk of the Sun, a “hair-thin glow” appeared around the planet. Lomonosov gave a correct scientific explanation of this phenomenon: he considered it a consequence of the refraction of solar rays in the atmosphere of Venus.

“Venus,” he wrote, “is surrounded by a light atmosphere, such (if only not more) than that which surrounds our globe.”

Characteristics

Distance from the Sun: 108,200,000 km
Length of day: 117d 0h 0m
Mass: 4.867E24 kg (0.815 Earth mass)
Acceleration free fall: 8.87 m/s²
Circulation period: 225 days

Pressure on the planet Venus reaches 92 earth atmospheres. This means that for every square centimeter a column of gas weighing 92 kilograms presses.

Diameter of Venus only 600 kilometers less than on Earth and is 12104 km, and the gravity is almost the same as on our planet. A kilogram weight on Venus will weigh 850 grams. Thus, Venus is very close to Earth in size, gravity and composition, which is why it is called an “Earth-like” planet, or “sister Earth”.

Venus rotates around its axis in a direction opposite to that of other planets solar system- from east to west. Only one other planet in our system behaves this way - Uranus. One rotation around its axis is 243 Earth days. But a Venusian year takes only 224.7 Earth days. It turns out that a day on Venus lasts more than a year! On Venus there is a change of day and night, but there is no change of seasons.

Research

Nowadays, the surface of Venus is explored both with the help of spacecraft and with the help of radio emission. Thus, it was noticed that a considerable part of the surface is occupied by rolling plains. The soil and sky above it are orange in color. The surface of the planet is pitted with an abundance of craters formed from the impacts of large meteorites. The diameter of these craters reaches 270 km! It is also common knowledge that Venus has tens of thousands of volcanoes. New research has revealed that some of them are active.

The third brightest object in our sky. Venus is called the Morning Star, and also the Evening Star, because from Earth it looks brightest shortly before sunrise and sunset (in ancient times it was believed that the morning and evening Venus- This different stars). Venus shines brighter in the morning and evening sky than the brightest stars.

Venus is lonely, she has no natural satellites. This the only planet The solar system, which received its name in honor of a female deity - the rest of the planets are named after male gods.

The planet Venus is one of our closest neighbors. Only the Moon is closer to us (excluding, of course, artificial satellites Lands launched in the last few years). Venus is visible as a very bright celestial object.

This planet is especially interesting because in many respects it is an almost exact twin of our Earth. Venus is approximately the same size and mass as Earth, so there is reason to expect similar physical conditions on both planets. Unfortunately, we cannot directly observe the surface of Venus, because its atmosphere is an insurmountable obstacle for our telescopes. Therefore, our knowledge about Venus is much more limited than about Mars, although the latter is further from us and smaller in size. In this book, I hope to summarize the results that astronomers have been able to accumulate and indicate possible directions further research. Venus is a mysterious world, but it seems that our attempts to explore it are finally taking off.

The solar system consists of one star - the Sun - and nine main stars, as well as a huge number of smaller celestial bodies. Planets do not have their own glow; they only reflect Sun rays and appear bright only because of their relative proximity. They revolve around the Sun in elliptical paths called orbits; the average distances of the planets from the Sun range from 58 million km for Mercury. In ancient times, however, they thought differently: the Earth was considered the center of the Universe, and the celestial bodies were considered deities.

Five planets - Mercury, Venus. Mars, Jupiter, Saturn - must have been known from prehistoric times, and even in ancient times it was noted that although the planets look like stars, they behave completely differently. Real stars appear motionless celestial sphere and participate only in its daily rotation, so the Chaldean shepherd astronomers thousands of years ago saw the same outlines of the constellations as we do. The planets Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, on the contrary, wander among the stars within a certain belt in the sky known as the Zodiac. Mercury and Venus also move in this belt, but at the same time follow the Sun as it moves among the stars (which gave reason to consider them to be closer to us than the Sun).

Venus, the brightest luminary after the Sun and Moon, is never visible in the sky throughout the night. Either it sets like an evening star a few hours after the Sun, or like morning Star appears shortly before sunrise. At one time it was believed that the morning and evening stars were different celestial bodies, and not the same planet. In Egypt, for example, the evening star was known as Owhaiti, and the morning star as Thiomuthiri; however, in China she was called by one name, Tai-pi, or White-faced Beauty.

The Babylonians called Venus Ishtar (the personification of woman and mother of the gods) and described her as “the bright torch of heaven.” Temples were erected in her honor in Nineveh and many other places. It was believed that Ishtar sent abundance to people. Ancient legend says that when Ishtar went to the kingdom of the dead to find her deceased lover Tammuz, all life on Earth began to fade away and was saved only thanks to the intervention of the gods, who resurrected Tammuz and thereby returned Igatar to the living. The analogy with the ancient legend of Demeter and Persephone is obvious.

The association of the planet with a woman took place among all peoples, except, perhaps, the Indians. This is quite natural, since to an earthly observer Venus appears to be the most beautiful of the planets. The Greeks and Romans gave the name to the goddess of beauty, and temples of Venus were erected in many places, such as Cyprus and Sicily. The month of April was dedicated to the goddess. In fact, the cult of Venus persisted until very recently. Williamson testifies that back in the 19th century. and Polynesia offered human sacrifices to the Morning Star; Sacrifices were also performed by the Skydy Pawnee Indians in Nebraska. It takes many years for ancient beliefs to fade away.

Homer also mentioned Venus: “Hesperus is the most beautiful of the stars of heaven.” The oldest surviving records of observations of the planet appear to have been made in Babylon. However, astronomy only firmly established itself as a science in ancient times. It became known that the Earth is not a plane, but a sphere, and other planets are also spheres. If the Greeks had taken one more step and overthrown our planet from its throne of honor at the center of the Universe, it seems that the progress of mankind would have accelerated. Some philosophers and scientists, most notably Aristarchus of Samos, did this, but their ideas contradicted religious tenets, and subsequently the ancient Greeks returned to geocentrism.

The ancient Greek system of the world received its highest development in the works of Hipparchus and Ptolemy. Claudius Ptolemy, who died around 180 AD, left us a work (“Almagest.”—Ed.), which reflected the level of knowledge in the period of decline ancient culture. This system is known as the "Ptolemaic system", although, in fact, Ptolemy was not its main author.

According to these ideas, the Earth is at the center of the Universe, and various celestial bodies revolve around it in “perfect” circular orbits. Lupa is closest to all other bodies to the Earth, then Mercury, Venus and the Sun, followed by the other three planets known at that time - Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and, finally, the stars.

Already in the time of Ptolemy, it was obvious that such a system of the universe faced significant difficulties. For example, the planets do not continuously move among the stars from west to east: Mars, Jupiter and Saturn can stop for several days, then go back, making a “retrograde” movement, and then again begin to move in the same direction - to the east. To get rid of this difficulty, Ptolemy, who was an excellent mathematician, proposed that the planet moves in a small circle, or "epicycle", the center of which in turn revolves around the Earth in a large circle - the "deferent". The possibility that planets could move in elliptical orbits was not allowed. Movement in a circle was considered the most perfect form movement, and nothing but absolutely perfect, of course, could happen in heaven.

New problems arose for Mercury and Venus, and Ptolemy was forced to assume that the centers of their epicycles were constantly in a straight line with the Sun and Earth. This at least explained why both planets never appear in opposite the Sun side of the sky. However, the whole system turned out to be too artificial and cumbersome.

IN early XVII V. was telescope invented, and in 1609 Galileo Galilei, a professor of mathematics in Padua, pointed the instrument he had just made to the sky for the first time. The scientist immediately saw that his expectations were more than justified. Were visible on the moon high mountains and huge craters; there were spots on the Sun; four circled around Jupiter own moons, and Saturn looked somehow strange, although Galileo could not figure out what was going on there, and Milky Way turned out to be a huge mass of faint stars.

Galileo himself was an ardent supporter heliocentric system world, which was resurrected and developed by Copernicus about 60 years earlier. Galileo looked for evidence of the validity of this system and found it, oddly enough, by observing the phases of Venus. Yes, Venus did exhibit phases, but they turned out to be of the same type as those of the Moon: sometimes the planet was observed in the form of a crescent, and sometimes as an almost complete disk.

Galileo's discoveries were met with a storm of indignation. The princes of the church objected vehemently; The story of Galileo's arrest, trial and forced abdication is well known. Many of his contemporaries refused to believe what they saw through telescopes, and Galileo did not live to fully admit that he was right.

Kepler also walked along the right way. His research, based on the precise observations of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, allowed the scientist to derive the famous laws of planetary motion that bear the name of Kepler. The first of these laws states that each planet revolves around the Sun in an ellipse, at one of the foci of which the Sun itself is located; the movement of Venus, as I expected, obeyed this law. At the very end of the century, Isaac Newton's works devoted to the problem universal gravity, finally clarified the whole picture. Since then, the Ptolemaic system and other geocentric systems have become a thing of the past.

The discovery of the phases of Venus helped open the door to knowledge; the path forward seemed clear.

Goddesses of love from the Roman pantheon. It is the only one of the eight major planets in the Solar System to be named after a female deity.

Venus is the third brightest object in the Earth's sky after the Sun and Moon and reaches an apparent magnitude of −4.6. Because Venus is closer to the Sun than Earth, it is never more than 47.8° away from the Sun (for an observer on Earth). Venus reaches its maximum brightness shortly before sunrise or some time after sunset, which gave rise to the name Evening Star or morning Star.

The surface of Venus is hidden by extremely thick clouds of sulfuric acid clouds with high reflective characteristics, which makes it impossible to see the surface in visible light (but its atmosphere is transparent to radio waves, with the help of which the planet’s topography was subsequently studied)

It is interesting that all the details of the relief of Venus are female names, with the exception of the highest mountain range planet located on Ishtar Earth near the Lakshmi Plateau and named after James Maxwell

Impact craters are a rare element of the Venusian landscape. There are only about 1,000 craters on the entire planet. The picture shows two craters with diameters of about 40-50 km. The interior area is filled with lava. The "petals" around craters are areas covered with crushed rock thrown out during the explosion that formed the crater.

Venus is easy to recognize, since it is much brighter than most bright stars. Distinctive feature the planet is its level White color(see photo above). Venus, like Mercury, does not move very far from the Sun in the sky.

Large craters on Venus are named after family names famous women, small craters - female names. Examples of large ones: Akhmatova, Barsova, Barto, Volkova, Golubkina, Danilova, Dashkova, Ermolova, Efimova, Klenova, Mukhina, Obukhova, Orlova, Osipenko, Potanina, Rudneva, Ruslanova, Fedorets, Yablochkina. Examples of small ones: Anya, Katya, Olya, Sveta, Tanya, etc.

Non-crateral relief forms of Venus receive names in honor of mythical, fairy-tale and legendary women: the hills are given the names of goddesses different nations, relief depressions - other characters from various mythologies:

Lands and plateaus are named after the goddesses of love and beauty; tesserae - named after the goddesses of fate, happiness and good luck; mountains, domes, regions - are called by the names of various goddesses, giantesses, titanides; hills - names of sea goddesses; the ledges are named after the goddesses of the hearth, the crowns are named after the goddesses of fertility and agriculture; ridges - the names of sky goddesses and female characters linked in myths with sky and light.
Furrows and lines are named after warlike women, and canyons are named after mythological characters associated with the Moon, hunting and forests.

Transit of Venus across the Sun

Poems, paintings, novels, and films were dedicated to Venus.

Dante Gabriel Rosseti Venus

VENUS IS A BIBLE GARDEN...

Earth's twin nights burning,
And before there was a wonderful garden there,
And life-giving light.

Venus is the biblical hell,
Her foggy red light
And the soil is stinking...
How to unravel her secret?

Venus is the biblical hell,
Was the most beautiful of the planets,
There was water and smoothness and harmony,
Now there is no life there.

There's a lot of lightning and winds,
Its volcanoes are alive,
From lava fire cover
And hot fountains.

She is beautiful and bright...
In an outfit of light gases,
She is like passion tart, bitter, -
The shine of diamonds is dangerous.

So love is its source...
(As long as there is a measure in everything) -
Heat and light conductor...
Messages of Lucifer.

His mysterious double...
Night shadow Hesperus,
Love has many faces...
Among the celestial spheres.

Poems by Larisa Kuzminskaya

Sandro Botticelli The Birth of Venus

Poliziano, “Giostra” (fragment):
The stormy Aegean, the cradle through the womb
Fedita swam among the foamy waters,
Creation of a different sky,
The dissimilar person stands up to face people
In a charming pose, looking animated,
There is a young virgin in her. Attracts
Marshmallow in love sinks the shell to the shore,
And their heavens rejoice in their flight.
They would say: the true sea is here.
And the sink with foam - like living ones,
And you can see that the goddess’s eyes are shining.
The sky and the elements are smiling before her.
There, in white, Ora walks along the shore,
The wind ruffles their golden hair.
You could see how she came out of the water,
She holds with her right hand
His hair, the other covering his nipple,
At the feet of the saints are her flowers and herbs
The sand was covered with fresh greenery.

Kustodiev Russian Venus

It is very easy to find it in the sky. Everyone has noticed how sometimes in the evening an “evening star” lights up in a still very bright sky. As the dawn fades, Venus becomes brighter and brighter, and when it gets completely dark and other stars appear, it stands out sharply among them. But Venus does not shine for long. An hour or two passes and she comes in. She never appears in the middle of the night, but there is a time when she can be seen in the morning, before dawn, in the role of the “morning star.” It is already dawn, all the other stars have long since disappeared, and Venus continues to shine and shine against the bright background of the morning dawn.

People have known Venus since time immemorial. Many legends and beliefs were associated with it. In ancient times they thought that these were two different luminaries: one appears in the evenings, the other in the mornings. Then they realized that this was the same luminary, the beauty of the sky, the “evening and morning star” - Venus. The “Evening Star” has been sung more than once by poets and composers, described in the works of great writers, and depicted in paintings by famous artists.

In terms of brilliance, Venus is the third luminary of the sky, if the Sun is considered first, and . It is not surprising that it can sometimes be seen during the day - in the form of a white dot in the sky.

The orbit of Venus lies within earth's orbit, and it circles the Sun in 224 days, or 7 ½ months. The fact that Venus is closer to the Sun than the Earth is the reason for the peculiarities of its visibility. Like Mercury, Venus can only move away from the Sun by certain distance, which does not exceed 46°. Therefore, it sets no later than 3-4 hours after sunset, and rises no earlier than 3-4 hours before morning.

Even with the weakest telescope it is clear that Venus is not a point, but a ball, one side of which is illuminated by the Sun, while the other is immersed in darkness.

Watching Venus day after day, you will notice that she, like Moon Mercury, goes through all the changes of phases.

Venus is usually easy to see with field binoculars. There are people with such acute vision that they can see the crescent of Venus even with the naked eye. This happens for two reasons: firstly, Venus is relatively large, it is only slightly smaller globe; secondly, in certain positions it comes close to the Earth, so that the distance to it decreases from 259 to 40 million km. This is the closest large one to us heavenly body after the moon.

In a telescope, Venus appears very large, much larger than the Moon to the naked eye. It would seem that you can see a lot of details on it, for example mountains, valleys, seas, rivers. Actually this is not true. No matter how many times astronomers looked at Venus, they were always disappointed. Visible surface This planet is always white, monotonous, and nothing is visible on it except vague dim spots. Why is this so? The answer to this question was given by the great Russian scientist M.V. Lomonosov.

The passage of Venus in front of the Sun in 1761 was observed, among many other scientists, by M. V. Lomonosov. Carefully watching through the telescope how the dark circle of Venus appears against the fiery background solar surface, he noticed a new, previously unknown phenomenon. When Venus covered the disk of the Sun by more than half of its diameter, a fiery rim, as thin as hair, suddenly appeared around the rest of the ball of Venus, which was still against the dark background of the sky. The same thing was visible when Venus left the solar disk. came to the conclusion that it was all about the atmosphere - the layer of gas that surrounds Venus. In this gas, the sun's rays are refracted, bend around the opaque globe of the planet and appear to the observer in the form of a fiery rim. Summing up his observations, Lomonosov wrote: “The planet Venus is surrounded by a noble air atmosphere...”

It was very important scientific discovery. proved that the planets are similar to the Earth in their motion. With his first observations through a telescope, he established that the planets are dark, cold balls on which there is day and night. Lomonosov proved that on planets, as on Earth, there can be an ocean of air - an atmosphere.

The air ocean of Venus differs in many ways from ours, earth's atmosphere. We have cloudy days, when a continuous opaque cover of clouds floats in the air, but there are also clear weather, when the Sun shines through the transparent air during the day, and thousands of stars are visible at night. It's always cloudy on Venus. Its atmosphere is always covered with white cloud cover. This is what we see when we look at Venus through a telescope.

The solid surface of the planet turns out to be inaccessible for observation: it is hidden behind a dense cloudy atmosphere.

And what is under this cloud cover, on the very surface of Venus? Are there continents, seas, oceans, mountains, rivers? We don't know this yet. Cloud cover makes it impossible to spot any features on the planet's surface and figure out how quickly they are moving due to the planet's rotation. Therefore, we do not know at what speed Venus rotates around its axis. About this planet we can only say that it is very warm, much warmer than on Earth, because it is closer to the Sun. It has also been established that there is a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Venus. As for the rest, only future researchers will be able to tell about it.

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The second planet from the Sun is Venus. In contrast to Mercury, it is very easy to find in the sky. Everyone has noticed how sometimes in the evening an “evening star” lights up in a still very bright sky. As the dawn fades, Venus becomes brighter and brighter, and when it gets completely dark and many stars appear, it stands out sharply among them. But Venus does not shine for long. An hour or two passes and she comes in. She never appears in the middle of the night, but there is a time when she can be seen in the morning, before dawn, in the role of the “morning star.” It’s already dawn, all the stars have long since disappeared, and the beautiful Venus is shining and shining against the bright background of the morning dawn.

People have known Venus since time immemorial. Many legends and beliefs were associated with it. In ancient times they thought that these were two different luminaries: one appears in the evenings, the other in the mornings. Then they realized that this was one and the same luminary, the beauty of the sky, the “evening and morning star” - Venus. The “Evening Star” has been sung more than once by poets and composers, described in the works of great writers, and depicted in paintings by famous artists.

In terms of brilliance, Venus is the third luminary of the sky, if the Sun is considered first, and the Moon second. It is not surprising that it can sometimes be seen during the day - in the form of a white dot in the sky.

Venus's orbit lies inside the Earth's orbit, and it circles the Sun in 224 days, or 7.5 months. The fact that Venus is closer to the Sun than the Earth is the reason for the peculiarities of its visibility. Like Mercury, Venus can only move away from the Sun a certain distance, which does not exceed 46°. Therefore, it sets no later than 3 - 4 hours after sunset, and rises no earlier than 4 hours before morning. Even with the weakest telescope it is clear that Venus is not a point, but a ball, one side of which is illuminated by the Sun, while the other is immersed in darkness.

Watching Venus day after day, you will notice that it, like the Moon and Mercury, goes through the entire change of phases.

Venus is usually easy to see with field binoculars. There are people with such acute vision that they can see the crescent of Venus even with the naked eye. This happens for two reasons: firstly, Venus is relatively large, it is only slightly smaller than the globe; secondly, in certain positions it comes close to the Earth, so that the distance to it decreases from 259 to 40 million km. This is the closest large celestial body to us after the Moon.

In a telescope, Venus appears very large, much larger than the Moon to the naked eye. It would seem that you can see a lot of details on it, for example mountains, valleys, seas, rivers. Actually this is not true. No matter how many times astronomers looked at Venus, they were always disappointed. The visible surface of this planet is always white, monotonous, and nothing is visible on it except vague dim spots. Why is this so? The answer to this question was given by the great Russian scientist M.V. Lomonosov.

Venus is closer to the Sun than Earth. Therefore, sometimes it passes between the Earth and the Sun, and then it can be seen against the background of the dazzling solar disk in the form of a black dot. True, this happens very rarely. The last time Venus passed in front of the Sun was in 1882, and the next time it will be in 2004. The passage of Venus in front of the Sun in 1761 was observed by M. V. Lomonosov, among many other scientists. Carefully watching through a telescope how the dark circle of Venus appears against the fiery background of the solar surface, he noticed something new, something no one had ever seen before. unknown phenomenon. When Venus covered the disk of the Sun more than half its diameter, a fiery rim, as thin as hair, suddenly appeared around the rest of the globe of Venus, which was still against the dark background of the sky. The same thing was visible when Venus left the solar disk. Lomonosov came to the conclusion that it was all about the atmosphere - the layer of gas that surrounds Venus. In this gas, the sun's rays are refracted, bend around the opaque globe of the planet and appear to the observer in the form of a fiery rim. Summing up his observations, Lomonosov wrote: “The planet Venus is surrounded by a noble air atmosphere...”

This was a very important scientific discovery. Copernicus proved that the planets are similar to the Earth in their motion. Galileo's first observations through a telescope established that the planets are dark, cold balls on which there is day and night. Lomonosov proved that on planets, as on Earth, there can be an ocean of air - an atmosphere.

The air ocean of Venus differs in many ways from our earthly atmosphere. We have cloudy days, when a continuous opaque cover of clouds floats in the air, but there are also clear weather, when the Sun shines through the transparent air during the day, and thousands of stars are visible at night. It's always cloudy on Venus. Its atmosphere is always covered with white cloud cover. This is what we see when we look at Venus through a telescope.

The solid surface of the planet turns out to be inaccessible for observation: it is hidden behind a dense cloudy atmosphere.