Lucifer, Phosphorus, Ishtar, Morningstar, Evening Star – all these sonorous names signify one and the same celestial body – Venus, the third brightest object in our sky. For many years, this planet has attracted sky watchers and scientists alike. Dense, impenetrable clouds shrouding its surface have excited observers’ imaginations, which prompted ideas of boundless oceans with impossible jungles crawling with monsters.

The reality turned out to be even more complicated and horrifying than these naive assumptions. Cosmo-Venus is the sun’s second-closest planet, lying 0.72 astronomical units away from the system’s center. Its orbital period equals roughly 225 earth days. Interestingly, every 584 days, the distance between Venus and our planet shrinks to its smallest at approximately 0.25 astronomical units. Notably, Venus faces the earth with one on the same side throughout their closest approach.

There is no hard evidence to account for this fact, but it may be either due to the tidal forces exerted by our planet, or else it could be a mere coincidence. In terms of its physical characteristics, Venus resembles the earth in many ways. Its average radius equals 6052 kilometers or 95 percent that of the earth, and its mass is 4.87 times 10 to the power of 24 kilograms, which is 0.82 that of our planet. Every 243 days, Venus completes a full rotation on its axis, and the rotation axis is tilted at 3.4 degrees with respect to the ecliptic plane. For a long time, Venus has concealed its real face from observers on the earth behind a veil of its dense atmosphere and thick clouds. This gave rise to a whole plethora of highly imaginative hypotheses and assumptions. Some of them claimed that there was a highly advanced civilization concealed under the planet’s impervious outer layer, while others suggested that there was a world that was home to peculiar life forms until a certain point in the recent past.

Observations show that Venus has no magnetic field, which is why the metallic core is more likely than not in a solid state. It is embedded in a silicate mantle as deep as three thousand kilometers. Its upper layer is a solid crust whose average thickness measures as much as 16 kilometers. It is posited that Venus’s lithosphere doesn’t form tectonic plates on account of high temperatures and a high viscosity of the rocks. This makes the planet’s geologic activity.