San Francisco State University | 2014 Sep 10
San Francisco State University astronomer Stephen Kane and a team of researchers presented today the definition of a "Venus Zone," the area around a star in which a planet is likely to exhibit the unlivable conditions found on the planet Venus.
The research will help astronomers determine which planets discovered with NASA's Kepler telescope -- which has a primary mission of finding habitable planets similar to Earth -- are actually more analogous to Earth's similarly-sized sister planet. Knowing how common Venus-like planets are elsewhere will also help astronomers understand why Earth's atmosphere evolved in ways vastly different from its neighbor.
"We believe the Earth and Venus had similar starts in terms of their atmospheric evolution," said Kane, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at SF State and lead author of the study published online today. "Something changed at one point, and the obvious difference between the two is proximity to the Sun." ...
Researchers Search for Venus-like Planets
Penn State University | 2014 Sep 11
On the Frequency of Potential Venus Analogs from Kepler Data - Stephen R. Kane et al
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1409.2886 > 09 Sep 2014