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. (NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite had previously identified LP 890-9b.) 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. LP 890-9c is one of two super-Earths orbiting a red dwarf star located 100 light years from Earth, the Delrez team – which included Kaltenegger – announced last year.
MacDonald, a former research associate at Cornell and now a NASA Sagan Fellow at the University of Michigan, of “ A Venus in the Making? Predictions for JWST Observations of the Ultracool M-Dwarf Planet LP 890-9c.” Co-authors are Rebecca Payne, research associate in the Department of Astronomy (A&S) Zifan Lin ’20, doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology James Kasting, professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University and Laetitia Delrez, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Liège in Belgium, who led an international team that reported the discovery of LP 890-9c in September 2022.Ī companion paper led by Jonathan Gomez Barrientos ’22, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, demonstrates that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) could distinguish between the exoplanet’s potential different atmospheres, making it a prime target for the flagship observatory. Kaltenegger is the lead author of “ Hot Earth or Young Venus? A Nearby Transiting Rocky Planet Mystery,” published June 21 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters. “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.” “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.
Kaltenegger’s team found that the “super-Earth” LP 890-9c (also named SPECULOOS-2c), which orbits close to the inner edge of its solar system’s habitable zone, would look very 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. How close can a rocky planet be to a star, and still sustain water and life?Ī recently discovered exoplanet may be key to solving that mystery, 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, director of the Carl Sagan Institute and associate professor of astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S).
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