According to this thesis, Venus is not beyond the edge of the habitable zone but was affected by a massive resurfacing event:
It all started about 700 million years ago when a massive resurfacing event triggered a runaway Greenhouse Effect that caused Venus’s atmosphere to become incredibly dense and hot. This means that for 2 to 3 billion years after Venus formed, the planet could have maintained a habitable environment. According to a recent study, that would have been long enough for life to have emerged on “Earth’s Sister”…
This flies in the face of conventional notions of habitability, which state that Venus’ orbit places it beyond the inner edge of our Sun’s habitable zone (HZ). Within this “Venus Zone”, according to conventional wisdom, a planet absorbs too much solar radiation to ever be able to maintain liquid water on its surface. But as Way indicated, their simulations all indicated otherwise:
“Venus currently has almost twice the solar radiation that we have at Earth. However, in all the scenarios we have modelled, we have found that Venus could still support surface temperatures amenable for liquid water.”
These findings are in line with a similar study that Way and Del Genio conducted in 2016 with colleagues from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the Planetary Science Institute (PSI), Uppsala University and Columbia University. For this study, their team created a suite of 3D climate simulations using data from the Magellan mission that examined how the presence of an ocean on ancient Venus would affect its habitability.
Matt Williams, “Venus Could Have Supported Life for Billions of Years” at Universe Today
Here’s the thesis:
It could be the basis for a “long ago and not so far away” space trilogy.
See also: Could there be life adrift in Venus’s clouds?
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