How did Venus become a hellscape? 234,000 simulations reveal four possible paths

Venus is increasingly becoming a touch point for our studies of exoplanets, as missions like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the upcoming Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) begin to characterize rocky exoplanets around other stars. Understanding the difference between the evolutions of Venus and Earth, which ended up with such different results, is a key to understanding whether we might be looking at an Earth-analog or a hellish landscape like Venus. A new paper by Rodolfo Garcia of the University of Washington and his colleagues, which is available on the arXiv preprint server, simulates Venus' 4.5 billion year evolution as part of the solar system to try to understand some of those differences.