NASA

NASA.

Slayer fans, listen up: Venus has heavy metal frost.

Elise Harrington, an undergraduate student at Simon Fraser University, had been reanalyzing data more than two decades to answer a longstanding mystery about the second planet from the sun. Radar waves bounce off the thick clouds of Venus at different elevations, but look at the upper layers and you'll see a series of dark blotches. These spots don't reflect radar waves, meaning there's something heavy in them.

With the exception of a few flybys, NASA hasn't launched a probe to Venus since Magellan, which shut down in 1994. So, with the help of Allan Treiman at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, Harrington retested the old data to investigate her idea about Venus: That the cooler temperatures at higher altitudes are the results of frost and snow.

This is a radar image of one of the areas sampled on Ovda. There is a smooth ramp across the map going from higher to lower elevations, shown as a gradual transition in radar brightness up the ramp. (The top of the ramp is brighter than the bottom of the ramp in the lower right corner). The bright areas to either side of the ramp are highland plateaus, and the curious dark spots are the mysterious areas at the highest elevations that the researchers are investigating.

Venus is a scorching planet choked with sulfuric acid, so we're not talking about the powdery, water-based snow of our planet. On Venus, Harrington says, we're looking at heavy metal compounds freezing from liquid to solid and falling from the sky.

Soon, perhaps, we'll get a better idea about whether she's right. While NASA has no active Venus mission, the European Space Agency's Venus Express spacecraft is orbiting the planet through the end of the year, and could shed some more light on these dark clouds of metal.

In the meantime, King Diamond devotees can confirm what they've always suspected: Venus is the most metal planet.

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