Earth and Venus are remarkably similar, but our sister planet is missing one key element: water. A recent study claims that Venus’ powerful electric wind is the culprit behind the arid planet’s lack of moisture.

With surface temperatures topping 860 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s no surprise that Venus has a dry surface. One would think the water simply boiled off, but according to a study , that’s too easy an explanation.

Lead author and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center scientist Dr. Glyn Collinson told the Christian Science Monitor that .

“It’s amazing and shocking.We never dreamt ,"saidCollinson in a press release. "This is something that definitely has to be on the checklist when we go looking for habitable planets around other stars.

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According to the study, Venus’ surface water may have first evaporated into steam. Once the water molecules made it to the upper atmosphere, they were broken down by light from the sun into hydrogen and oxygen ions. While the hydrogen ions are able to easily escape Venus’ gravitational pull, the heavier oxygen ions run into more trouble.

If the oxygen ions were going to make it off of Venus, they would have to be pushed by a strong electric force, which Venus happens to have.

The team came across Venus’ electric field by using the NASA-SwRI-UCL electron spectrometer, which is part of the larger ASPERA-4 instrument on the ESA Venus Express, according to the release. While watching electrons flow out of the upper atmosphere, the scientists noticed electrons were not escaping at their expected rate because they were being tugged on by the potent electric field. They measured the change in speed and found the strength of the field to be much stronger than anticipated and at least five times stronger than Earth’s.

“We’ve been studying the electrons flowing away from Titan and Mars as well as from Venus, and the ions they drag away to space to be lost forever,” co-author and University College London Mullard Space Science Laboratory professor Andrew Coates said in the release. “We found that over 100 metric tons per year escapes from Venus by this mechanism – significant over billions of years. The new result here is that the electric field powering this escape is surprisingly strong at Venus compared to the other objects.”

"We don't really know why it is so much stronger at Venus than Earth," said Collinson, “But, we think it might have something to do with Venus being closer to the sun, and the ultraviolet sunlight being twice as bright. It's a really challenging thing to measure, and to date, all we have are upper limits on how strong it might be here."

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The scientists also believe the electric wind on Mars plays an important role in the Red Planet’s lack of water and atmosphere.

“With ESA’s Mars Express, we have already caught this process in action at Mars, and MAVEN can now determine its relative importance,” said Coates. “With NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, we found that Titan loses 7 metric tonnes per day this way.”

“Even a weak electric wind could still play a role in water and atmospheric loss at any planet," said co-author Dr. Alex Glocer of NASA Goddard. "It could act like a conveyor belt, moving ions higher in the ionosphere where other effects from the solar wind could carry them away."

By learning more about the role played by a planet’s electric winds, astronomers hope to improve estimates of the size and location of habitable zones around other stars.

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