“This was a needle-in-a-haystack search with no guarantee that the needle exists.”
“This world is not quiet, not quiescent, not dead,” says planetary scientist Paul Byrne of Washington University in St. Louis who was not involved in the new work.
Venus is about the same size and mass as Earth so it should have a similar amount of internal heat. And that heat must escape somehow. Scientists have long thought that Venus should be volcanically active. “We’ve just never had something we can point to. And now we do,” Byrne says. He’s also confident that volcanoes on Venus can still erupt now.
“There’s no way you have a planet that big that was doing something 30 years ago and stopped,” he says. “It’s definitely still active today.” Planetary scientist Robert Herrick spotted the change after painstakingly poring through images of the Venusian regions considered most likely to be volcanically active. “This was a needle-in-a-haystack search with no guarantee that the needle exists,” says Herrick, of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Several features in these Magellan radar images look like they’ve changed between the first observation and the second . But most of those differences occurred because the spacecraft was looking in opposite directions, giving different shading and illumination to the surface. Scientists were able to show that one crater’s apparent differences were due to those imaging differences . Another one was due to real changes on Venus’ surface — probably a volcanic eruption.
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