Sharjah24 - Reuters: A fresh analysis of radar images obtained more than three decades ago has yielded new evidence indicating Venus, Earth's planetary next-door neighbor, is currently volcanically active - a dynamic world with eruptions and lava flows.
Researchers said on Wednesday radar images taken by NASA's Magellan spacecraft showed that a volcanic vent about a mile (1.6 km) wide on the Venusian surface expanded and changed shape over an eight-month span in 1991. The vent is situated on Maat Mons, which at about 5 miles (9 km) tall is the planet's highest volcano and second-highest mountain.
A February 1991 image showed the vent as a circular formation covering about one square mile (2.6 square km). A October 1991 image showed the vent with an irregular shape covering about 1.5 square miles (3.9 square km).
"What we definitively can demonstrate is that a volcanic vent got larger and looks to have gone from conical and hundreds of meters deep in its interior to a flat, nearly filled interior," said Robert Herrick, a University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute research professor and lead author of the study published in the journal Science.
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