The second-closest planet from the sun, Venus is known to have a history of active volcanoes, but new research suggests such activity is ongoing.
According to BBC News, the European Space Agency's Venus Express spacecraft delivered observations as recently as 2012 that showed potential signs of volcanic activity. The recent discovery backs up what the spacecraft already learned two years previously.
The new analysis of Venus' potentially active volcanoes is published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
"We were able to show strong evidence that Venus is volcanically, and thus internally, active today," study co-author James W. Head, a geologist at Brown University, said in a press release. "This is a major finding that helps us understand the evolution of planets like our own."
The scientists conducted their analysis on infrared images of one particular "hotspot" from a region of Venus dubbed "Ganiki Chasma."
"We have now seen several events where a spot on the surface suddenly gets much hotter, and then cools down again," study lead author Eugene Shalygin, of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, told BBC News. "These four hotspots are located in what are known from radar imagery to be tectonic rift zones, but this is the first time we have detected that they are hot and changing in temperature from day to day. It is the most tantalizing evidence yet for active volcanism."
Rift zones are considered signals of volcanic activity because they are a result of subsurface activity that stretches and alters what lies above.
"We knew that Ganiki Chasma was the result of volcanism that had occurred fairly recently in geological terms, but we didn't know if it formed yesterday or was a billion years old," Head said in the release. "The active anomalies detected by Venus Express fall exactly where we had mapped these relatively young deposits and suggest ongoing activity."
