(ORDO NEWS) — A team of astronomers have proposed using the James Webb Space Telescope to observe the planets that exist in the so-called “Venus Zone”.
The term Venus Zone was first proposed in 2014 by astrophysicist Stephen Cain of the University of California, Riverside.
This zone describes the region around a star where the planet is too hot to have liquid water, but not so hot that it no longer has an atmosphere.
New observations may shed light on the evolution of Venus . It can also tell us a lot about the transformation of potentially habitable planets into fiery hellish places.
Some scientists believe that Venus may have once been habitable before it became a fiery planet.
In fact, researchers believe that the detection of gases such as methane or nitrous oxide on Venus-like exoplanets could indicate the existence of life on these planets.
“The discovery of these molecules would show that habitable worlds could exist in the Venusian zone and would strengthen the possibility of a temperate period in Venus’s past,” said Colby Ostberg, Ph.D., of the University of California.
Ostberg led a study aimed at identifying five of the 300 discovered Venus-like planets that would be ideal candidates for future observations by the James Webb telescope.
Their search will be based on certain criteria, including size, mass and orbital trajectory.
The researchers, who published their findings in The Astronomical Journal, also looked for planets orbiting bright stars to make it easier for the telescope to observe them.
“It’s possible that one or the other evolved the planet in an unusual way, but it’s hard to answer that question when we only have two planets to analyze in the solar system, Venus and Earth,” he explained.
“Exoplanet studies will give us a statistical opportunity to explain the observed differences.”
If the telescope data shows us that most of the planets in the Venus zone are showing a similar fiery evolution, then this may be cause for concern, as this is the possible future of our planet.
“That would be a warning to us here on Earth because the danger is real,” Kane said.
“We need to understand what happened there to make sure it doesn’t happen here.”
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