Venus may have had a moon for nearly "2 billion years"

 

Image courtesy of NASA imiages/Shutterstock

Joel Kontinen

Darwinian fables are interesting, as there is no proof of them being true. As with Venus having a moon many billions of years ago.    

Venus has no moon, but a modelling study suggests it probably did have one for "nearly 2 billion years" – before the planet ate it. Understanding this could help us learn about Venus’s previous habitability.

Many large objects probably hit Venus in the early solar system, which could have formed a moon, similar to the giant impact that is thought to have formed Earth’s moon. “There’s a very good chance that Venus did have a moon-forming impact,” says Stephen Kane at the University of California, Riverside..

 Kane and his colleagues modelled what would have happened if Venus did have a moon, and found that in almost all scenarios, it would have been consumed by the planet,.

Venus rotates quite strangely with respect to the sun, completing a rotation once every 243 days, compared with its orbit of 225 days. This is possibly a result of its thick atmosphere slowing its spin.

In contrast, Earth’s much faster spin transfers angular momentum to our moon, meaning it is moving away a few centimetres each year. For Venus, the opposite would have been true. “The moon is transferring angular momentum inward instead of outward,” says Kane. “It causes the moon’s orbit to catastrophically collapse.”

The researchers found that at the upper limit of their models, a moon about half the mass of our own could have survived around Venus for 1.7 billion years. At twice the mass of our moon, it would have survived just 30 million years, because of the stronger tidal effect.

Paul Byrne at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, says the model is interesting but hard to prove. “It’s exceedingly hard to test this idea because there is basically nothing left behind.” This is because Venus’s surface has been repeatedly resurfaced by volcanism, he says.

In Genesis, God created the Earth and its moon without any evolution.

Source:

Jonathan O’Callaghan 2026 Venus may have had a moon for nearly 2 billion years | New Scientist 2 September