♀ Venus

Named for the Roman goddess Venus (Greek: Aphrodite)

Love Beauty Desire Gardens Victory

Which sign is Venus in now?

Detail of Venus and Mars by Sandro Botticelli
Venus and Mars Sandro Botticelli, c. 1485 National Gallery, London Detail: Venus reclines on the left of the painting; Mars, with his eyes closed, lies to the right, and small satyrs hold his helmet and lance. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The goddess of love and beauty, honored by the Romans as the mother of their people.

The goddess

Venus is the Roman goddess of love, beauty, desire, fertility, prosperity and victory. In her earliest known form, kitchen gardens and market gardens were dedicated to her, and she came to share the stories of the Greek Aphrodite. The Romans saw her as their ancestor: she was the mother of Aeneas, the Trojan prince who survived the fall of Troy and fled to Italy, and Julius Caesar, who claimed her as his own ancestor, dedicated a temple to Venus Genetrix, “Venus the Mother,” on September 26, 46 BCE. Her festival, the Veneralia, was held on April 1. She and Mars, the god of war, were lovers; Botticelli’s Venus and Mars shows the two of them together.

More about the goddess on the Aphrodite page: her stories, symbols and correspondences →

How the planet got its name

The ancient Romans could see five planets, and they named them after their most important gods. Venus is the only planet named for a goddess. It is the brightest thing in the sky after the Sun and the Moon. As the morning star the Greeks called it Phosphoros, and as the evening star Hesperos (the Romans’ Lucifer and Vesper): two names for the same planet. Babylonian astronomers identified it with Ishtar.

Symbols

Myrtle Rose Scallop shell

The planet

A rocky planet similar in size and structure to Earth, sometimes called Earth’s twin, but wrapped in carbon dioxide under dense clouds of sulfuric acid. The greenhouse effect makes it the hottest planet in the solar system, at about 467 °C, hot enough to melt lead, and the air pressure at the surface is 93 times Earth’s. Venus spins slowly backward compared with Earth, so there the Sun would rise in the west, and one turn takes 243 Earth days, longer than its year.

Diameter
12,104 km 0.95 × Earth
Mass
4.87 × 10²⁴ kg 0.82 × Earth
Gravity
8.9 m/s² 0.91 × Earth's
Length of day
116.8 Earth days sunrise to sunrise
Length of year
224.7 Earth days one trip around the Sun
Distance from the Sun
108.2 million km 0.72 AU (Earth = 1)
Average temperature
464 °C 867 °F
Moons
None
Rings
No

Figures from NASA’s Planetary Fact Sheet; the temperature is its “mean temperature.” Comparisons with Earth are worked out from the same sheet.

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