The link between the Sun, the atmosphere and the planet’s fate is written all over each world in our Solar System. This is why temperatures heat up during the day and cool off during the night, something that’s pretty much true for every planet that has both a day side and a night side. Venus makes the hottest planet in the solar system, after which it is Mercury. The fact that Venus is nearly twice as far from the Sun, however, matters a great deal. Nice. Don’t let the Moon’s white appearance fool you! The hottest planet is Venus (at 462 Celsius)" 1- It’s not that Mercury isn’t hot. The Moon, for example, looks to have a pretty high albedo to our eyes, with a white appearance during both the day and night. In reality, all physical objects have an albedo between 0 and 1. It likely had the same potential for life and biological processes, but a runaway catastrophe created the permanent inferno that's inhabited our sister world for billions of years. Because it’s so close to the sun, you might think Mercury would also be the hottest planet, but that’s actually not the case. It is at least so dense that despite being closest to the Sun, it lets Venus be the hottest planet. Most people find this to be an amazing fact, but the reason for this is actually quite easy to explain. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Jonathan Chone, under a c.c.a.-s.a.-4.0 international license, modified by E. Siegel. Earth? However, mercury is not the hottest planet in the solar system. With no atmosphere to trap heat, surface temperatures … Orbits of the inner and outer planets. Because although Mercury is the closest planet to the sun, it does not have an atmosphere. Not only does Venus possess an atmosphere many times the thickness of Earth's, loaded with huge amounts of infrared-absorbing gases like carbon dioxide, but it's shrouded in terrifically thick layers of highly reflective clouds. In the grand scheme of the Solar System, the greatest source of energy by far is the Sun. But just because it’s red, doesn’t make it the hottest. Mercury and Venus are the two closest planets to the Sun, so it stands to reason that they are also the hottest planets in the solar system. Mercury turns out to be similar to the Moon at 0.119, while Venus’ albedo is by far the highest of all planetary bodies in the Solar System at 0.90. Mercury has a very weak atmosphere so it can’t hold any heat. This sulfuric acid haze, which extends for more than 20 km in thickness, encircles the planet at speeds from 210 to 370 km/hr, trapping the vast majority of the radiated heat and transferring it all across the planet. Image credit: E. Siegel. The long nights provide no escape from the heat, as the trapping and thermalizing effects of the cloud layers keep the surface of Venus at an inhospitably high temperature, so much so that if you added up the operational time of every lander that ever touched down on Venus’ surface, it wouldn’t even sum to half an Earth-day. And yet, when you measure the temperature of Venus, there's a surprise: Venus is the same temperature at all times, day or night, at an average of 735 Kelvin (462 °C / 863 °F), making it even hotter than Mercury! While radioactivity and gravitational contraction might supply a substantial amount of energy to the cores of massive planets, the light and heat emitted from our parent star is overwhelmingly responsible for a planet’s surface temperature. Although Mercury is the closest to the sun, it’s not the hottest planet. 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