The new findings suggest there are eruptions on Venus about every few months, similar to some Earth volcanoes in places like Hawaii, the Canary Islands and Iceland, Herrick said.

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This is the latest evidence that Venus, lacking the plate tectonics that gradually reshape Earth’s surface, is not the geologically dormant world some scientists had once considered it. Another study published in 2020 identified 37 volcanic structures apparently active in the past 2 million to 3 million years.

Venus, with a diameter of about 12,000km, is slightly smaller than Earth. Its thick atmosphere - mainly carbon dioxide - traps in heat in a runaway greenhouse effect, rendering Venus the solar system’s hottest planet.

In our solar system, Earth resides comfortably within the “habitable zone” around the sun - the distance considered not too close and not too far from a star to be able to host life, with Venus near the inner boundary and Mars close to the outer edge.

“As we continue to discover new solar systems around other stars, understanding how Venus and Earth came to end up so different now is important to understanding what the conditions are for making a planet habitable,” Herrick said.

“For instance, there are a lot of scientists who think Venus might have been habitable for a large fraction of its history, which would mean that the concept of a ‘habitable zone’ of a fixed distance around a star is an outdated concept. Maybe the distance is just one contributing factor and there is a bunch of other factors equally important,” Herrick added.

Reuters