Researchers at the Instituto de Astrofisica e Ciencias do Espaco (IA) have used the Venus atmosphere as a natural laboratory to understand the evolution of Earth-like planets. The team chose a planet 106 light-years away, with 1.37 times the diameter of the Earth, discovered in 2022, to present the first simulation in three dimensions of the climate of a rocky planet with the properties we now see on Venus. The planet, with the name LP 890-9 c, orbits its star at a distance that places it in the habitable zone, but very close to the limit for a runaway greenhouse effect that we see on Venus. The results of the simulation of this hypothetical exo-Venus were presented by an international team led by Diogo Quirino, of the Instituto de Astrofisica e Ciencias do Espaco (IA), and Gabriella Gilli, collaborator of IA and researcher at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia (IAA-CSIC), in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
