New study suggests Venus once harbored a moon for nearly 2 billion years

Among the rocky planets of our solar system, Venus stands alone in the sky without a companion moon — a solitude that has long invited questions about how worlds are shaped and what they lose over time. A new study suggests Venus was not always so isolated: it may have harbored a natural satellite for nearly two billion years before the planet's own extreme conditions gradually undid that relationship. The research shifts the question from whether Venus ever had a moon to how and why it lost one, placing the planet's peculiarity not at the beginning of its story but somewhere deep within it. I