The Starset SocietyHow close can a rocky planet be to a star, and still sustain water and life? A recently discovered exoplanet may be key to solving that mystery.
“Super-Earth” LP 890-9c (also named SPECULOOS-2c) is providing important insights about conditions at the inner edge of a star’s habitable zone and why Earth and Venus developed so differently, according to new research led by Lisa Kaltenegger, associate professor of astronomy at Cornell University.
Her team found LP 890-9c, which orbits close to the inner edge of its solar system’s habitable zone, would look vastly different depending on whether it still had warm oceans, a steam atmosphere, or if it had lost its water — assuming it once had oceans like Earth’s.
“Looking at this planet will tell us what’s happening on this inner edge of the habitable zone — how long a rocky planet can maintain habitability when it starts to get hot,” Kaltenegger said. “It will teach us something fundamental about how rocky planets evolve with increasing starlight, and about what will one day happen to us and Earth.”
Kaltenegger is the lead author of “Hot Earth or Young Venus? A Nearby Transiting Rocky Planet Mystery,” published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters.
LP 890-9c is one of two super-Earths orbiting a red dwarf star located 100 light years from Earth, researchers announced last year. They said liquid water or an atmosphere rich in water vapor was possible on LP 890-9c, which is about 40% larger than Earth and circles the small, cool star in 8.5 days.
Those criteria suggested it to be one of the best targets for JWST to study among the known, potentially habitable terrestrial planets, in addition to the TRAPPIST-1 system.
The team’s models are the first to detail differences in the chemical signatures generated by rocky planets near the habitable zone’s interior boundary, based on variables including the planet’s size, mass, chemical makeup, surface temperature and pressure, atmospheric height and cloud cover. The calculations were key to estimating how much time JWST would need to confirm the basic composition of an atmosphere — if there is one.
The models span several scenarios thought to reflect stages of rocky planets’ evolution, ranging from a “hot Earth” where life might still be possible, to a desolate Venus featuring a carbon dioxide atmosphere. In between are phases Earth is expected to experience as the sun grows brighter and hotter with age, causing the oceans to gradually evaporate and fill the atmosphere with steam before boiling off entirely.
How long those processes might take is unknown, and the astronomers say LP 890-9c provides a rare opportunity to explore that evolution.
Read more at Sciencedaily.com
