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rfmcdonaldI linked earlier to Centauri Dreams' take on the news--here, reported by Universe Today's Nancy Atkinson--that Earth-like planets with Earth-like environments orbiting red dwarfs are more common than thought.
The paper in question is available here.
Size might matter when it comes to stars having habitable environments for planets, and in this case smaller might be better, as well as closer to Earth. A new study indicates that low mass stars may be the most abundant planet hosts in our galaxy. And since these smaller stars like M-dwarfs are plentiful, the number of potentially habitable planets could be greater than previously thought.
“We now estimate that if we were to look at 10 of the nearest small stars we would find about four potentially habitable planets, give or take,” said Ravi Kopparapu from Penn State University. “That is a conservative estimate,” he added. “There could be more.”
Kopparapu has published a new paper where he recalculated how common Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of low-mass stars, also known as cool stars or M-dwarfs. Since the orbit of planets around M-dwarfs is very short, this allows scientists to gather data on a greater number of orbits in a shorter period of time than can be gathered on Sun-like stars, which have larger habitable zones.
[. . .]
“The average distance to the nearest potentially habitable planet is about seven light-years,” Kopparapu said. “That is about half the distance of previous estimates.”
Kopparapu said there are about eight of these cool stars within 10 light-years of Earth, and the thinks, conservatively, we should expect to find about three Earth-size planets in the habitable zones.
[. . .]
“I used our new habitable zone calculations and found that there are nearly three times as many Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones around these low mass stars as in previous estimates,” Kopparapu said. “This means Earth-sized planets are more common than we thought, and that is a good sign for detecting extraterrestrial life.”
The paper in question is available here.
