Venus
From Gwn
| Venus (OMa-2) | |
| |
| Discovered: | Known to pre-historic humanity. |
| Named After: | Named after the Roman God |
| Relative Size: | 0.9 Earths |
| Satellites: | None |
Venus is the second-closest planet to the Sun. A terrestrial planet, it is sometimes called Earth's "sister planet", as the two are similar in size, gravity, and bulk composition. The planet is covered with an opaque layer of highly reflective clouds, preventing its surface from being seen from space in visible light, and which made it a subject of great speculation until some of its secrets were revealed by planetary science in the twentieth century. Venus has the densest atmosphere of the terrestrial planets, consisting mostly of carbon dioxide, and the atmospheric pressure at the planet's surface is 90 times that of the Earth.
History
Venus was known in the Hindu Jyotisha since early times as the planet Shukra. In the West, before the advent of the telescope, Venus was known only as a 'wandering star'. Several cultures historically held its appearances as a morning and evening star to be those of two separate bodies. Pythagoras is usually credited with recognizing in the sixth century BC that the morning and evening stars were a single body, though he espoused the view that Venus orbited the Earth. When Galileo first observed the planet in the early 17th century, he found that it showed phases like the Moon's, varying from crescent to gibbous to full and vice versa. This could be possible only if Venus orbited the Sun, and this was among the first observations to clearly contradict the Ptolemaic geocentric model that the solar system was concentric and centered on the Earth.
Venus Council
see Venus Council.
Meaning of the Name
As one of the brightest objects in the sky, Venus has been known since prehistoric times and from the earliest days has had a significant impact on human culture. It is described in Babylonian cuneiformic texts such as the Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa, which relates observations that possibly date from 1600 BC. The Babylonians named the planet Ishtar, the personification of womanhood, and goddess of love. The Ancient Egyptians believed Venus to be two separate bodies and knew the morning star as Tioumoutiri and the evening star as Ouaiti. Likewise believing Venus to be two bodies, the Ancient Greeks called the morning star Φωσφόρος, Phosphorus, the "Bringer of Light" or Εωσφόρος, Eosphorus, the "Bringer of Dawn"; the evening star they called Hesperos (Ἓσπερος, the star of the dusk) — by Hellenistic times, it was realized they were the same planet. Hesperos would be translated into Latin as Vesper and Phosphorus as Lucifer, a poetic term later used to refer to the fallen angel cast out of heaven. The Romans would later name the planet in honor of their goddess of love, Venus, whereas the Greeks used the name of its Greek counterpart, Aphrodite.
To the Hebrews it was known as Noga ("shining"), Ayeleth-ha-Shakhar ("deer of the dawn") and Kochav-ha-'Erev ("star of the evening"). Venus was important to the Mayan civilization, who developed a religious calendar based in part upon its motions, and held the motions of Venus to determine the propitious time for events such as war. The Maasai people named the planet Kileken, and have an oral tradition about it called The Orphan Boy. In western astrology, derived from its historical connotation with goddesses of femininity and love, Venus is held to influence those aspects of human life. In Vedic astrology, where such an association was not made, Venus or Shukra affected wealth, comfort, and attraction. Early Chinese astronomers called the body Tai-pe, or the "beautiful white one". Modern Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese cultures refer to the planet literally as the metal star (Chinese: 金星), based on the Five elements.
