Possible Venus ‘twin’ discovered

Possible Venus(शुक्र) ‘twin’ discovered

Astronomers, using NASA’s Kepler space telescope, have discovered (खोजा) a Venus-like planet orbiting (परिक्रमा) a dim star that is one-fifth the diameter of our Sun and is located 219 light years away from Earth. The newly found planet is only slightly larger than Earth, and it tightly embraces(आलिंगन)  its low-temperature star called Kepler-1649, encircling(घेरा बनाना) it every nine days. The tight orbit causes the flux of sunlight reaching the planet to be 2.3 times as great as the solar flux on Earth. For comparison, the solar flux (सौर प्रवाह) on Venus is 1.9 times the terrestrial value.

The discovery will provide insight into the nature of planets around M dwarf stars, by far the most common type in the universe.

Venus compared with the Earth

Both planets have almost the same size and density and Venus is only a 30% closer to the Sun than Earth.

There are many more differences between both planets. 

1 Whereas Earth rotates in about 24 hours Venus rotates in the contrary sense (retrograde rotation) in 243 days. The orbital period of Venus is 225 days so that a Venus year takes less than a full day. The combination of these two periods results in the Sun appearing from the West and dissapearing over the East with a day-night cycle of 117 days.

2 The atmosphere of Venus is 90 times more dense than that on Earth and it is made of 96.5% of CO2 and a 3% of nitrogen. This means that both planets have the same amount of Nitrogen on their atmospheres. Surprinsingly the CO2 on Earth is stored on calcite type rocks and if we would convert the CO2 on these rocks into atmospheric CO2 it would amount to the same amount of CO2 that there is on Venus' atmosphere.

3 Because of the denser atmosphere and the chemical composition Venus experiences an inmense green-house effect that raises the temperature over the surface to more than 470ºC.