Venus

 Venus is the second closest planet to the sun and is nearly the same size of Earth, a bit smaller in fact. It takes 243 Earth days to rotate once, but takes 225 Earth days to orbit the sun. These are some trivial facts about Venus, but I will take you on an adventure so you can get a deeper insight into the planet.

Venus is the second closest planet to the sun and it is the hottest planet in our solar system. The cause of this extreme heat is due to the planets thick atmosphere. Venus' atmosphere is mainly carbon dioxide, which amplifies the green house effect. The green house effect is the effect which captures the visible light (or Ultra Violet radiation) emitted from by the sun where a portion of the light is absorbed by the Earth, while another portion of the light is reflected from the Earth's crust back into space. However not all the light is reflected back into space as certain gases in  the atmosphere gases, which are called greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, water vapour and methane, these gases absorb some of the reflected light from earths crust (which isn't light anymore it is now inferred radiation) leading to an increase in the temperature of a planet. This is happening on Earth (this is what we call climate change), but it happened on Venus a while back and this is why it is so hot. Venus' atmosphere is full of green house gases so the visible light that enters the planets atmosphere can't escape due to the concentration of green house gases in the planets atmosphere. This is what leads to the surface temperature of Venus being 465 degrees celsius. As a result of this thick atmosphere Venus is the hottest planet in our solar system.

Venus is a rocky planet, however we have not explored much of it. From the book that I read (The planets by Brian Cox and Andrew Cohen), the soviets where the ones who explored the planet the ,most with their Venera missions to the planet. The Venera explores did not last long however, only a few minutes with later ones lasting roughly one hour. This is due to the planets intense heat which would melt the explorers making it difficult to gain access to much information about the planet.

Overall the message from Venus is that climate change is a series threat and if we take the world that we currently live in and change nothing we will meet the same fate as Venus and suffocate on our own greenhouse gases.