Venus May Have Hosted a Short-Lived Moon Before Its Demise

A new arXiv study suggests Venus could have harbored a moon for up to about 1.7 billion years (if the moon was roughly half the mass of Earth's), while a moon twice as massive would last only ~30 million years before Venus’ gravity drags it into the Roche limit and tears it apart, implying a brief, moon-influenced phase in Venus’s early history that could relate to its potential habitability.