Venus ate its moon

New orbital‑evolution models suggest a primordial moon around Venus could have survived only tens of millions to around 1.7 billion years before tidal interactions and Venus’s slow rotation forced it to spiral inward and impact the planet. The hypothesis is currently on arXiv and is testable: geochemical and surface data from missions such as NASA’s DAVINCI could reveal signatures of such a late, large impact or constrain the timing of Venus’s spin evolution. — If correct, this changes how we read the absence of moons — both in our solar system and around exoplanets — and affects arguments about planet formation, tidal evolution, and habitability.