How can Venus be hotter than Mercury even though Mercury is closer to the Sun?

Mercury gets closer to the Sun, but it has almost no atmosphere to hold heat. Venus, by contrast, is wrapped in a dense atmosphere made mostly of carbon dioxide, with clouds of sulfuric acid that reflect sunlight but also trap infrared radiation extremely efficiently. This creates a runaway greenhouse effect, making Venus the hottest planet in the Solar System. Surface pressure on Venus is about 92 times Earth’s, similar to being nearly 1 kilometer underwater on Earth. The Soviet Venera landers in the 1970s and 1980s showed just how extreme the surface conditions really are.