Venus has a massive lava tube

Science News · Feb 23, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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The cave was found through a new look at 1990s data from orbiting radar The collapsed roof of the lava tube was detected through a reanalysis of orbital radar data from NASA's Magellan probe in the 1990s. RSLab/University of Trento Shrouded from astronomers’ view by dense clouds, Earth’s “sister planet” Venus is slowly giving up some of its secrets. A lava tube beneath the Venusian surface — the first ever detected — could help explain how the planet formed, researchers report February 9 in Nature Communications. The detection was made by re-analyzing orbital radar data from an early 1990s NASA probe, to reveal a collapsed “skylight” in the roof of the lava tube. The discovery will influence two future probes: NASA’s VERITAS mission, due to launch before June 2031, and the European Space Agency’s EnVision mission, which is expected to launch later the same year. “Both spacecraft will carry advanced radar instruments capable of acquiring images of the Venus surface at significantly higher resolution than those currently available,” says Lorenzo Bruzzone, a remote sensing scientist at the University of Trento in Italy. Venus has been called Earth’s sister planet because it is relatively nearby and almost the same size. But the clouds perpetually shield it from view. NASA’s Magellan probe revealed the surface is shaped by active volcanoes, although there is little sign Venus ever had plate tectonics. The probe’s decades-old radar maps are still the best scientists have, and Bruzzone and colleagues reanalyzed the data with specialized imaging techniques to spot telltale skylights. Their search revealed a skylight near a massive shield volcano called Nyx Mons (“Mountain of Nyx” in Greek, named for an ancient night goddess.) Further analysis revealed that the collapsed skylight was about 150 meters deep and that it opened into an empty lava tube at least 375 meters deep. The “skylight” was found near a large shield volcano on Venus called Nyx Mons, amid other depressions known as “pit chains” that are thought to show where underground lava tubes have fallen in.Carrer et al. / Nature Communications 2026The “skylight” was found near a large shield volcano on Venus called Nyx Mons, amid other depressions known as “pit chains” that are thought to show where underground lava tubes have fallen in.Carrer et al. / Nature Communications 2026 But the researchers estimate the lava tube may be much wider — up to one kilometer wide, which is larger than lava tubes on Earth or Mars and equivalent to large lava tubes on Earth’s moon, where the gravity is much lower. “This helps us better understand how the planet evolved and how its geology compares with that of other rocky bodies in the solar system,” Bruzzone says. Lava tubes on the moon might one day be shelters for astronauts against solar radiation and meteorites, and they’ve also been detected on Mars. But no human is likely to visit the Nyx Mons lava tube on Venus, where the atmospheric pressure at the surface is 93 times thicker than Earth’s, and it is so hot that regular silicon electronics won’t work. Nonetheless, the discovery of the lava tube on Venus suggests there are more to be found, while validating certain models of volcanism on the mysterious planet, Bruzzone says. Planetary scientist Anna Gülcher of Germany’s University of Freiburg was not involved with the work, but studies how volcanos are shaping Venus. “It is remarkable that we are still extracting new insights from Magellan data, which was collected more than three decades ago,” Gülcher says. “This highlights both the lasting value of that mission, the progress we have made in data analysis, and the renewed interest in the planet.” More Stories from Science News on Planetary Science