They solve the mystery of why Venus has almost no water

Venus It is the second closest planet to the Sol and one day it could have been very similar to ours, but today it has almost no water. A new study points to an explanation that has to do with hydrogen atoms escaping from its atmosphere.

The mechanism exposed in Nature by a team led by the University of Colorado in Boulder (USA) has been overlooked for more than 50 years due to the design limitations of the instruments of the spacecraft that have approached the planet.

Although Venus is almost the same size as Earth and has a similar composition, it bears little resemblance to our planet. The temperature on its surface, covered in volcanoes, is about 470 degrees and the atmospheric density is almost a hundred times that of Earth, with clouds and sulfuric acid rain.

The researchers turned to computer simulations to try to explain why Venus became so drydespite the fact that it is believed that billions of years ago, during its formation, it received as much water as our planet.

Today our neighboring planet has 100,000 times less water than Earthsaid one of the signatories of the study Michael Chaffin, from the University of Colorado.

The research indicates that Hydrogen atoms from Venus’ atmosphere shoot into space through a process known as dissociative recombination. which causes the loss of approximately twice as much water per day compared to previous estimates.

The culprit of this water leak would be a molecule called HCO+ (an ion made up of one hydrogen atom, one carbon atom, and one oxygen atom) that It is located high in the atmosphere of Venus.

HCO+ is constantly produced in the atmosphere, but individual ions do not survive long. Electrons from the atmosphere find these ions and they recombine to divide them into two.

In this process, hydrogen atoms disperse and can even escape into space, depriving Venus of one of the two components of water. Previous research has already pointed to HCO+ as a possible cause of Mars also losing much of its water.

The group calculated that the only way to explain the dry state of Venus was for the planet to harbor larger-than-expected volumes of HCO+ in its atmosphere.

The problem is that, until now, HCO+ has not been observed around Venus, but the reason may be that it has never been looked for, because the earth is necessary for these measurements.

The results of this study could help explain what happens to water on many planets throughout the galaxy.

Venus may have once looked almost identical to Earth, but at some point catastrophe struck and clouds of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere triggered the most powerful greenhouse effect in the solar system, raising the surface temperature. up to almost 500 degrees.

That process caused all the water to evaporate and most of it to be dispersed into space, but that evaporation cannot explain why it is so dry today or how it continues to lose water to space. That is the question that the current study tries to answer.