When Was The Planet Venus Discovered?
Venus is the brightest object in the sky after the sun and the moon and it is among the five planets – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – which are visible to the naked eye. It is because of this easy visibility that Venus has been known since the antiquity; though it is likely that the ancient astronomers didn’t know what Venus was besides being an object which wandered around in the skies. It was a Polish astronomer Nicolas Copernicus (or ‘Miko?aj Kopernik’ in Polish) who proposed that Venus was a planet like the Earth.
Venus appears in the skies twice every day – just before the sunset and the sunrise. These two appearances are also known as the ‘morning star’ and the ‘evening star’. The ancients thought that the ‘morning star’ and the ‘evening star’ were two different entities. It was the ancient Greek astronomer Pythagoras of Samos, who is usually credited with discovering that the ‘morning star’ and the ‘evening star’ were the same body around 6th century BC; Venus. The Italian scientist Galileo Galilee confirmed Nicolas’ theory that Venus was a planet.
A Soviet spacecraft, Venera-1, was the first man made object to leave the Earth to study Venus on 12 February, 1961. Another Soviet spacecraft, Venera 3, was the first spacecraft to land on the surface of another planet; the spacecraft landed on Venus on 1 March, 1966. Spacecrafts of the Venera series showed that the surface temperature of Venus was about 500ºC and the atmosphere was 90-95% carbon dioxide.
