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Finding Venus Zone Planets with PLATO Will Show Us How Habitable Planets Evolve

While simply finding exoplanets was an important first step in exoplanet science, more ambitious goals await. The ESA will launch PLATO in 2027 to search for rocky planets. But it will also find planets in the Venus Zone, a region bounded on its outer edge by a runaway greenhouse climate and on the inner edge by loss of atmosphere due to stellar flux. Understanding these planets will help scientists understand how Earth's path led to sustained habitability, while Venus, its sister planet, ended up with a runaway greenhouse climate.

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