Find Out Why Venus Has No Water

Venus' similarity to Earth may be extraordinary. However, the planet located second from the sun is missing one element that our beautiful planet is abundant of - water.

Apparently, oceans once occupied Venus, but now all the water is gone.

It's a puzzle, but scientists may have found the reason why.

According to a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, the extremity of Venus' electric field could be the culprit of the disappearance of H2O in the planet. It seems that surface temperatures of over 860 degrees Fahrenheit resulted to the planet's current bone-dry state.

The question now is - where did the water go?

If Venus were Earth, all that steam would have boiled off the surface of the planet and into its atmosphere. However, the planet's thick atmosphere is strangely dry. Add to that the fact that the planet's pressure is 100 times that of Earth, and yet it still has up to 100,000 times less water than ours, the lack of water is definitely mysterious.

In the video below, NASA scientist Glyn Collinson explains where all that steam went:

"It's amazing, shocking," said Collinson in a statement (h/t Space). "We never dreamt an electric wind could be so powerful that it can suck oxygen right out of an atmosphere into space. This is something that has to be on the checklist when we go looking for habitable planets around other stars."

As it turns out, and as explained in a new research in the journal Geophysical Research Letters published Monday, the surprisingly strong electrical field enveloping Venus is the reason for all that lack of water.

Such electric field is "a monster of a force," that it's powerful enough drive all that atmospheric water to space, says Collinson, lead author of the study.

The electric field was discovered with the electron spectrometer aboard the European Space Agency spacecraft Venus Express, which orbited Venus from 2006 and 2014.