The research gives a new view of Venus's climatic history and may have implications for the habitability of exoplanets in similar orbits.
Forty years ago, NASA's Pioneer Venus mission found tantalising hints that Earth's 'twisted sister' planet may once have had a shallow ocean's worth of water.
To see if Venus might ever have had a stable climate capable of supporting liquid water, researchers from NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in the US created a series of five simulations assuming different levels of water coverage.
In all five scenarios, they found that Venus was able to maintain stable temperatures between a maximum of about 50 degrees Celsius and a minimum of about 20 degrees Celsius for around three billion years.
A temperate climate might even have been maintained on Venus today had there not been a series of events that caused a release, or 'outgassing', of carbon dioxide stored in the rocks of the planet about 700-750 million years ago.
"Our hypothesis is that Venus may have had a stable climate for billions of years. It is possible that the near-global resurfacing event is responsible for its transformation from an Earth-like climate to the hellish hot-house we see today," said Way.
Three of the five scenarios studied by researchers assumed the topography of Venus as we see it today and considered a deep ocean averaging 310 metres, a shallow layer of water averaging 10 metres and a small amount of water locked in the soil.
To simulate the environmental conditions at 4.2 billion years ago, 715 million years ago and today, the researchers adapted a 3D general circulation model to account for the increase in solar radiation as our Sun has warmed up over its lifetime, as well as for changing atmospheric compositions.
Although many researchers believe that Venus is beyond the inner boundary of our solar system's habitable zone and is too close to the Sun to support liquid water, the new study suggests that this might not be the case.
At 4.2 billion years ago, soon after its formation, Venus would have completed a period of rapid cooling and its atmosphere would have been dominated by carbon-dioxide, the researchers said.
If the planet evolved in an Earth-like way over the next three billion years, the carbon dioxide would have been drawn down by silicate rocks and locked into the surface, they said.
By the second epoch modelled at 715 million years ago, the atmosphere would likely have been dominated by nitrogen with trace amounts of carbon dioxide and methane -- similar to the Earth's today -- and these conditions could have remained stable up until present times.