In order to prevent our planet from turning into a red-hot acid nightmare, which Venus once became, American planetary scientists advise to look for worlds similar to Venus from other stars, study them, and finally figure out what happened to the once, possibly, potentially inhabited neighbor of the Earth.
As a rule, the most media coverage is received by discoveries of earth-like planets - rocky, in the habitable zone of their stars, the temperatures on which are not too low and not too high for liquid water to exist on the planet. Every time we find an Earth-like planet, we hope that life is possible on this new world, and we are upset when we are told that life is hardly possible there. This happens all the time, for example, with Proxima b - our nearest exoplanet; the joy of its discovery for a couple of years has been canceled out by models and calculations showing why it cannot be inhabited: the outbursts of activity of its star, the red dwarf Proxima Centauri, should have sterilized the planet long ago, if something similar to the Earth was born on it a life.
But do not be upset when you find another dead world, according to Giada Arney and Stephen Kane, American planetary scientists who published a preprint article on the need to find worlds similar to Venus. Instead, you need to look for hot, dry, cloudy planets of greenhouse gases and try to understand how they got like that.
Now Venus is a completely unfriendly place: the air pressure there is almost 100 times higher than on Earth, the temperature at the surface on a hot day reaches 480 ° C, and the atmosphere consists mainly of sulfuric acid vapors and carbon dioxide. But scientists believe that Venus was not always a hot and acidic hell; perhaps two or three billion years ago it was very similar to Earth, maybe the conditions on it were even suitable for the origin of life.
What turned Venus into a branch of hell in the solar system is still not very clear, but it is clear that greenhouse gases played a large role in this metamorphosis, so red-hot Venus serves as a warning to earthlings from careless attitude to the atmosphere of their own, still blue planet. Perhaps the study of similar worlds outside our planetary system will help to understand how Venus became as it is now, Arnie and Kane believe. Scientists hope that exo-Venus will become a popular subject of research, and powerful new instruments such as the recently launched TESS space observatory will devote more of their computer time to observing such planets.