When a Day Is Longer Than a Year

Ever have one of those days where seconds seem like hours? The length of this one particular day stretches on and on until it seems as though a year has passed.

There’s a place where this happens literally every day. Before you start making vacation plans, I had better tell you where this place is.

I’m talking about Venus, our next-door neighbor in our solar system. Venus goes around the sun in less time than it spins around on its axis, so a day on Venus is longer than a year, although not by too much. A Venusian day is about 243 Earth days, while a year on Venus is about 225 Earth days.

Imagine Venus being more Earth-like. Instead of pizza-oven temperatures (860 degrees Fahrenheit, or 460 Celsius), we have an average around 59°F (15°C). Instead of an atmosphere 90 times more intense than Earth’s—with enough pressure to crush a typical submarine—we get a stable, boring single atmosphere of pressure. Instead of suffocating on carbon dioxide, imagine us being able to breathe the air and s…