Speaker: Giada Arney (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Planetary Studies) Title: Venus: The Exoplanet Next Door Zoom Link: https://washington.zoom.us/my/uwastrobiology
Please contact astrobio@uw.edu in advance of the meeting for the password Abstract: This talk will evaluate Venus as an example of the runaway greenhouse state that bounds the inner edge of the habitable zone. Despite its current extremely hot surface environment, Venus may once have been habitable with oceans of surface liquid water. Thus, present day Venus may represent an 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 may be common types of planets, and we likely have already discovered many of Venus’ sisters orbiting other stars. Importantly, our near-future exoplanet detection and characterization methods are biased towards observing these types of hot worlds. Therefore, it is instructive to consider what Venus can teach us about exo-Venus analogs. By observing exo-Venus planets of differing ages and in different astrophysical contexts, these distant hot terrestrial worlds may likewise allow us to witness processes that occurred on Venus in the past. |