Venus

Venus As An Analog for Hot Earths

By Keith Cowing
Press Release
astro-ph.EP
April 17, 2018
Filed under
Venus As An Analog for Hot Earths
Earth/Venus
Rice University

Here, we evaluate our nearest planetary neighbor, Venus, as an exemplar of the runaway greenhouse state that bounds the inner edge of the habitable zone. Despite its current hellish surface environment, Venus may once have been habitable with oceans of surface liquid water.

Over time, it lost its potentially clement environment as the sun brightened. Today, it represents the end-state of habitable planet evolution, and it therefore provides valuable lessons on habitability as a planetary process. Beyond the solar system, exo-Venus analogs are likely common types of planets, and we likely have already discovered many of Venus’ sisters orbiting other stars. Furthermore, our near-future exoplanet detection and characterization methods are biased towards observing them. Therefore, it is instructive to consider what Venus can teach us about exo-Venus analogs. By observing exo-Venus planets of differing ages in in different astrophysical contexts, these distant hot terrestrial worlds may likewise allow us to witness processes that occurred on Venus in the past.

Giada Arney, Stephen Kane
(Submitted on 16 Apr 2018)

Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:1804.05889 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:1804.05889v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Giada Arney
[v1] Mon, 16 Apr 2018 18:46:44 GMT (1491kb)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.05889
Astrobiology

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