Space weather explosion may swallow planet Venus

Giant pertubations called hot flow anomalies in the solar wind near Venus can swallow the entire planet, scientists say.

Researchers recetly discovered that a common space wether phenomenon on the out5skirts of Earth's magnetic bubble, the magnetosphere,
has much larger repercussions for Venus that they're bugger than the entire planet and they can happen multiples times a day.
    "Not only they are gigantic," said Glyn Collinson, a space scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, 
"But as Venus doesn't have a magnetic field to protect itself, the hot flow anomalies happen right on the top of the planet.
They could swallow the planet whole," said Collinson.
    The work is based on observations from the Europian Space Agency's Venus Express. The results show hust how large and how
frequent this kind of space weather is at Venus. Earth is protected from the constant streaming solar wind of radiation by its
Magnetosphere. Venus, however, has no such luck.
     A barren, inhospitable planet, with an atmosphere so dense that spacecraft landing there are crushed within hours, Venus
 has no magnetic protections. At Earth, hot flow anomalies do no make it inside the magnetoshere, but they release so much ebergy
 just outside that the solar wind is deflected, and can be forced to move back toward the Sun. Without a magnetosphere, what happens
 aat planet Venus is different.
    Venus's only protection from the solar wind is the charged outer layer of its atmosphere called the ionosphere. A sensitive 
pressure balance exists betweeen the ionosphere and the solar wind, a balance easily disrupted by the giant energy rush of a hot flow anomaly.
    The hot flow anomalies may create dramatic, planet-scale disruptions, posibly sucking the ionosphere up and away from the surface of the
planet. You can find more on this in the Journal of Geophysical Research.