Study Narrows James Webb Space Telescope Targets 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 i
Image depicts divergent evolutionary pathways of Earth and Venus after formation. Credit: O’Rourke, J.G., Wilson, C.F., Borrelli, M.E. et al.With the first paper compiling all known information about planets likebeyond our solar system, scientists are the closest they’ve ever been to finding an analog of Earth’s “twin.”
. 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., also ranked the most Venus-like planets in terms of the brightness of the stars they orbit, which increases the likelihood that thewould get more informative signals regarding the composition of their atmospheres.
“The Venus Zone is where it would be too hot to have water, but not hot enough that the planet’s atmosphere gets stripped away,” Ostberg explained. “We want to find planets that still have significant atmospheres.”Finding a planet similar to Venus in terms of planet mass is also important because mass affects how long a planet is able to maintain an active interior, with the movement of rocky plates across its outer shell known as plate tectonics.
The research team is proposing the planets identified in the paper as targets for the Webb telescope in 2024. Webb is the most expensive and advanced observation tool ever created and will enable scientists not only to see whether the exoVenuses have atmospheres, but also what they’re made of. “It could be that one or the other evolved in an unusual way, but it’s hard to answer that when we only have two planets to analyze in our solar system, Venus and Earth. Theexplorations will give us the statistical power to explain the differences we see,” Kane said.
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