Solved cryptogram
Venus is hotter at the surface than Mercury, even though it orbits much farther from the sun.
Astronomy Facts, sourced to NASA.
What it means
Distance from the sun is not what sets a planet's temperature. Venus is wrapped in a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere that lets sunlight in and will not let the heat back out, and the runaway greenhouse effect that results holds the surface at around four hundred and sixty degrees Celsius. That is hot enough to melt lead, and it is roughly the same everywhere, day side and night side alike.
The claim comes from NASA, and the page it comes from was read on 2026-08-27 to confirm it still says this.
This is not the kind of claim that goes out of date, which is why it was set as a puzzle rather than a fact with a shelf life.
Solve it yourself
This fact is a cryptogram here: 75 letters over 17 different ones, graded medium.
- SourceNASA
- CollectionAstronomy Facts
- Difficultymedium
- Length75 letters, 17 of them different
Nearby in the collection
The facts either side of this one.
About as hard as this one
Scored closest to it by the model behind our guide to solving cryptograms.