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In a breathless puff piece, Variety celebrated tennis star Venus Williams' new crusade for “equal pay” with male tennis players. But her sudden concern for equal pay seems to clash with events even she was involved in. Williams claims she realized she would not be paid the same as men when she was 16. “Getting there and realizing, ‘Wow, I’m not being paid equally,’ was just definitely a slap in the face to a 16-year-old. … It hit me hard.” But both Venus and her sister Serena have already been involved in a game that shows the disparity between the...

Look up in the sky at the right moment this weekend and you could see two of the solar system's brightest planets almost touching. Venus and Jupiter will be millions of miles apart, but from Earth they will appear close to colliding. This planetary conjunction happens annually but this year they will appear much closer than usual. The same spectacle won't occur again like this until 2039. Just the naked eye or binoculars should be enough to see it in a clear sky. After Saturday, the two planets will go their separate ways as they drift apart in the coming...

The month starts off with three bright planets clustered low in our east-southeast sky just before sunrise. Venus, Saturn and Mars are within six degrees of separation, but each morning thereafter the configuration noticeably changes. Mars and Saturn approach each other more closely than the apparent diameter of the moon on April 5. A view of the predawn sky on April 19, 2022 in Stellarium shows the alignment of Jupiter, Venus, Mars and Saturn. (Image credit: Stellarium) The main event comes during the final week of April with the approach of magnitude -2 Jupiter to magnitude -4 Venus, seven times...

Explanation: This was a very unusual type of solar eclipse. Typically, it is the Earth's Moon that eclipses the Sun. In 2012, though, the planet Venus took a turn. Like a solar eclipse by the Moon, the phase of Venus became a continually thinner crescent as Venus became increasingly better aligned with the Sun. Eventually the alignment became perfect and the phase of Venus dropped to zero. The dark spot of Venus crossed our parent star. The situation could technically be labeled a Venusian annular eclipse with an extraordinarily large ring of fire. Pictured here during the occultation, the Sun...

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has taken its first visible light images of the surface of Venus from space. Smothered in thick clouds, Venus’ surface is usually shrouded from sight. But in two recent flybys of the planet, Parker used its Wide-Field Imager, or WISPR, to image the entire nightside in wavelengths of the visible spectrum – the type of light that the human eye can see – and extending into the near-infrared.

Earth has officially been joined in its orbit around the Sun by a new trojan asteroid. Named 2020 XL5, this chunk of rock is only the second object of its type ever to have been conclusively identified. Its discovery suggests that perhaps Earth trojans may be more common than we knew, and offers new insights into these mysterious rocks. Like the first trojan, astronomers predict that 2020 XL5 will hang around for at least 4,000 years before zipping off to parts elsewhere. "The discovery of a second Earth trojan asteroid may enhance our knowledge of the dynamics of this elusive...

A statue of the Roman goddess Venus was found on the construction site of a future hotel in the center of Zadar, about a meter high, preserved from the knees to below the chest, made of marble, and about 1800 years old, reports Slobodna Dalmacija. "Academician Nenad Cambi, our greatest expert on antiquity, believes that it is most likely a statue of the goddess Venus. Its full height was about two meters, and it was probably on a pedestal in the atrium of this ancient urban villa where we are now," said Smiljan Gluščević. A statue of the Roman goddess...

This video discuss the possible reaction with Comet Leonard and Venus tonight, (12/17) and 12/18... The first 12 minutes is where the key information is.

Jupiter, Saturn and Venus have lined up in the evening sky and will continue to be prominent features throughout most of December, but this week, the trio will get a visitor. The easy-to-find planets, paired with the approaching peak of the Geminid meteor shower, make December a great month for evening stargazing. The only caveat is that the weather can be fickle during the long December nights, often offering frosty conditions on nights that are not cloudy. The moon started off the week next to Venus, and as the week progresses, it will continue to move up the chain, passing...

You don't need a big showy celestial event like an eclipse to have a magical moment with the night sky. Sometimes, the subtler experiences are just as moving. Head out in the evening on Sunday, Nov. 7 to witness the scenic crescent moon posing with Venus nearby. While Sunday will see the moon and Venus at their snuggliest, you'll have an extended window for some great planet-spotting opportunities. "From Nov. 6th through the 11th, watch the moon glide past Venus, Saturn, and Jupiter after sunset in the south/southwest," NASA said. Jupiter and Saturn will appear to move closer to Venus...

Astronomers have long struggled to pin down how long a day lasts on Venus, but new research suggests the difficulty stems not from flawed measurements but from real variations in the planet's spin.In a new study, scientists used a massive radar system to bounce lightwaves off our neighboring planet over the course of more than a decade. As a result, the researchers were able to measure how tilted Venus' axis is, how big its core is, and how long it takes the planet to complete one full rotation...Between 2006 and 2020, the team used this radar system to bounce a...

FRIDAY, MAY 7Greet Mercury and Venus low in the west-northwest in the fading afterglow of sunset. You may first spot Venus, bright at magnitude –3.9, very low exactly west-northwest. As the sky darkens further, Mercury will come into view some 9° above Venus as shown below. Mercury fades from magnitude 0.0 to +0.5 this week.Much higher to their upper left, in the west as night falls, is little [currently very distant] Mars. [Mars is currently on the other side of the Sun, many millions of miles more distant than where it is on the same side as Earth] New Moon...

Venus is an enigma. It’s the planet next door and yet reveals little about itself. An opaque blanket of clouds smothers a harsh landscape pelted by acid rain and baked at temperatures that can liquify lead. Now, new observations from the safety of Earth are lifting the veil on some of Venus’ most basic properties. By repeatedly bouncing radar off the planet’s surface over the last 15 years, a UCLA-led team has pinned down the precise length of a day on Venus, the tilt of its axis and the size of its core. The findings are published today in the...

Explanation: If you could stand on Venus -- what would you see? Pictured is the view from Venera 14, a robotic Soviet lander which parachuted and air-braked down through the thick Venusian atmosphere in March of 1982. The desolate landscape it saw included flat rocks, vast empty terrain, and a featureless sky above Phoebe Regio near Venus' equator. On the lower left is the spacecraft's penetrometer used to make scientific measurements, while the light piece on the right is part of an ejected lens-cap. Enduring temperatures near 450 degrees Celsius and pressures 75 times that on Earth, the hardened Venera...

The joint U.S.-European Solar Orbiter spacecraft had an appointment with Venus this morning (Dec. 27), the first in a series of planetary flybys to hone the probe's orbit on its journey to the sun. Solar Orbiter reached its closest approach to Venus at 7:39 a.m. EST (1239 GMT), when the spacecraft was about 4,700 miles (7,500 kilometers) from the top of the planet's cloud tops. The probe, a partnership between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), launched in February, bound to spend seven years studying our sun. But to get as close to our star as scientists want to,...

Human beings need safe homes and love. The foundation for this was and always will be family. Families flourish when society is free. So in Vergil’s classic epic poem, The Aeneid, the Trojan hero Aeneas is loyal to his father and history, as he seeks a new home for his people. The goddess Juno holds old grudges against Aeneas and his people and makes life hard for them. But the love of his mother Venus leads him to a safe harbour in Carthage for the Trojan people. This story was part of the process of making the Roman people proud...

Explanation: What would an erupting volcano on Venus look like? Evidence of currently active volcanoes on Venus was announced earlier this year with the unexplained warmth of regions thought to contain only ancient volcanoes. Although large scale images of Venus have been taken with radar, thick sulfuric acid clouds would inhibit the taking of optical light vistas. Nevertheless, an artist's reconstruction of a Venusian volcano erupting is featured. Volcanoes could play an important role in a life cycle on Venus as they could push chemical foods into the cooler upper atmosphere where hungry microbes might float. Pictured, the plume from...

Venus Is a Russian Planet ... Says Russia Just because you get there first, that doesn't mean you own it. Russia has some strong feelings about the planet Venus. Dmitry Rogozin, the chief of Roscosmos, Russia's space agency, spoke at the 2020 HeliRussia exhibition and declared that Venus is a "Russian planet," according to the Russian news agency TASS. (It's not.) This comes after the groundbreaking announcement on Monday that researchers have spotted potential evidence of life high in the clouds of Venus. The scientists found chemical signatures of a molecule called phosphine, which is only produced by living things...

Researchers have discovered the molecule phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus. The molecule indicates that life may exist in the acidic clouds high above our sister planet. The discovery of phosphine in the Venusian atmosphere could signal a rejuvenated interest in the planet, which has long been ignored in favor of other locales in the solar system. A mystery lurks in the clouds high above the stifling surface of our nearest planetary neighbor, Venus. Researchers have announced they've found traces of phosphine, a molecule potentially generated by living things, in the planet's clouds. Planetary scientists have long speculated that Venus's...

Scientists have identified 37 volcanic structures on Venus that appear to have been recently active - and probably still are today - painting the picture of a geologically dynamic planet and not a dormant world as long thought. The research focused on ring-like structures called coronae, caused by an upwelling of hot rock from deep within the planet's interior, and provided compelling evidence of widespread recent tectonic and magma activity on Venus's surface, researchers have said. Many scientists had long thought that Venus, lacking the plate tectonics that gradually reshape Earth's surface, was essentially dormant geologically, having been so for...