Hunting Venus 2.0: Scientists sharpen their sights
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Loading... - Perez Sofia
- 27 Mar 2023
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With the first paper compiling all known information about planets like Venus beyond our solar system, scientists are the closest they've ever been to finding an analog of Earth's "twin."
If they succeed in locating one, it could reveal valuable insights into Earth's future, and our risk of developing a runaway greenhouse climate as Venus did.
Scientists who wrote the paper began with more than 300 known terrestrial planets orbiting other stars, called exoplanets. They whittled the list down to the five most likely to resemble Venus in terms of their radii, masses, densities, the shapes of their orbits, and perhaps most significantly, distances from their stars.
The paper, published in The Astronomical Journal, also ranked the most Venus-like planets in terms of the brightness of the stars they orbit, which increases the likelihood that the James Webb Space Telescope would get more informative signals regarding the composition of their atmospheres.
Today's Venus floats in a nest of sulfuric acid clouds, has no water, and features surface temperatures of up to 900 degrees Fahrenheit -- hot enough to melt lead. Using the Webb telescope to observe these possible Venus analogs, or "exoVenuses," scientists hope to learn if things were ever different for our Venus.
"One thing we wonder is if Venus could once have been habitable," said Colby Ostberg, lead study author and UC Riverside Ph.D. student. 'To confirm this, we want to look at the coolest of the planets in the outer edge of the Venus zone, where they get less energy from their stars."
The Venus Zone is a concept proposed by UCR astrophysicist Stephen Kane in 2014. It is similar to the concept of a habitable zone, which is a region around a star where liquid surface water could exist. Read More…
