Astronomers are desperate to know what happened to Venus.
Now, thanks to the recent discovery of the hot gassy planet’s virtual twin—LP 890-9 c, an apparently rocky, wet, Earth-and-Venus-sized planet orbiting a red dwarf star 98 light-years from Earth—those astronomers might finally have a chance to crack the mystery wide open. The problem is, right now there’s just one telescope capable of surveying this twin.
“The Venus-Earth divergence is one we must understand if we are to learn why planets like Earth can sometimes be habitable for billions of years and sometimes become uninhabitable, at least for our kind of life,” David Grinspoon, an astrobiologist with the Arizona-based Planetary Science Institute, told The Daily Beast.
To get a good read on LP 890-9 c, Barrientos, MacDonald and company—or some other team of astronomers—would need to point the JWST at the planet at least three times, but preferably seven or so, scanning different wavelengths of light in order to measure different gases: oxygen, ozone, water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen dioxide and nitrogen.
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