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Credit: NASA/JPL/USGS
Each week this summer, Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to SPACE.com, presents The Greatest Mysteries of the Cosmos, starting with our solar system.
Although the second planet from the sun is named after the Roman goddess of love, Venus is anything but lovely, at least from a hospitality perspective. For starters, its surface temperature pushes 900 degrees Fahrenheit, making Venus the hottest planet in the solar system.
It gets worse: A thick shroud of carbon dioxide presses down with 92 times the pressure of Earth's atmosphere on a bone-dry landscape. The opaque clouds that block our view of the world's surface are laced with sulfuric acid.
As you might imagine, studying Venus has proved difficult. But bit by bit, scientists are learning more about Earth's closest planetary neighbor. Here are some of the biggest mysteries regarding the brightest object in our sky after the sun and the moon:
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