This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Venus is one of the solar system's most unusual planets. It may sometimes be called "Earth's twin" because of its similar size and density, but it rotates on its axis in the opposite direction of most planets, has surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead and lacks a moon.
Why this terrestrial planet has no satellites has puzzled scientists for decades. Did it never manage to form one, or did it once have a moon that vanished over time? New research posted on the arXiv preprint server could help us get closer to solving the mystery.
The paper does not provide a definitive answer, but it presents compelling scenarios for how a moon could have existed and leans toward one conclusion. So how do scientists investigate a moon that is no longer there to study? The team led by Stephen R.
Kane fed a range of data, including Venus's spin speed, a hypothetical moon's mass, its orbital distance from the planet and internal tidal friction, into a computer model. Then they ran computer simulations spanning 4.5 billion years. They also tweaked core variables to see which scenarios allowed a moon to survive and which led to its destruction.
The scientists found that the moon's fate depended heavily on factors such as its mass and how fast Venus was spinning. Under some conditions, a moon could have survived for 4.5 billion years, while under others it would have been destroyed. In many scenarios where the moon was destroyed, it initially moved outward before changes in Venus's spin caused its orbit to reverse and spiral inward toward the planet.
And which possibility does the team think is most likely? They suggest that the moon was most likely destroyed after spiraling back toward Venus. Depending on the moon's mass and the planet's initial spin, this could have happened anywhere from 30 million years to 1.7 billion years after the moon formed.
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