5 ms·
Consequences of Tidal Dissipation in a Putative Venusian Ocean
- clebio 7y agoSkimming just the abstract: > Consequently, an ocean tide on ancient Venus could have had significant effects on the rotational history of the planet The implication seems to be that we could answer whether Venus once had water, based on the orbital history of the Earth (over very long time frames), I guess?
- blackhaz 7y agoI may be wrong but I don't think so. It is not suggested in the article. You'd need to know precisely how fast Venus was spinning when it had oceans. NewAtlas [0] interprets this as ancient ocean possibly being the culprit of Venus' extremely slow rotation period (~243 d.) [0]: https://newatlas.com/ancient-venus-ocean-slow-down-rotation/59808/ https://newatlas.com/ancient-venus-ocean-slow-down-rotation/...
- ncmncm 7y agoI would have titled it "posited", not "putative", I think.
- ncmncm 7y agoI think a subtext here is that the moon has saved Earth from that fate. Such a moon must be very rare, for rocky planets in the Goldilocks zone. There is a plausible argument that life would not have developed at anything like its pace, without. That might resolve the Fermi paradox, unless warm gas-giant moons are common and not all bathed continuously in ionizing radiation.
- rwallace 7y ago> The associated tidal torque is about 2 orders of magnitude below the present day Venusian atmospheric torque That never occurred to me before this moment, but of course the dense atmosphere would tend to exert some tidal drag. The above sentence indicates the atmosphere alone suffices to explain the slow rotation. But that would seem to flat-out contradict everything else said here. The atmosphere, not the ancient ocean, is the explanation. What am I missing?