"The Best Bet for Alien Life May Be in Planetary..." Topic

… Systems Very Different From Ours.

"In the hunt for extraterrestrial life, scientists started by searching for a world orbiting a star just like the sun. After all, the steady warmth of that glowing yellow ball in the sky makes life on Earth possible.

But as astronomers continue to discover thousands of planets, they're realizing that if (or when) we find signs of extraterrestrial life, chances are good that those aliens will orbit a star quite different from the sun—one that's redder, cooler, and at a fraction of the sun's size and mass. So in the quest for otherworldly life, many astronomers have set their sights on these small stars, known as red dwarfs or M dwarfs.

At first, planet-hunting astronomers didn't care so much about M dwarfs. After the first planet outside the solar system was discovered in 1995, scientists began hunting for a true Earth twin: a rocky planet like Earth with an orbit like ours around a sun-like star. Indeed, the search for that kind of system drove astronomers through most of the 2000s, says astronomer Phil Muirhead of Boston University…"
Full article here
link

Amicalement
Armand

There are more of the Red Dwarves

Ya know, all those old space opera world generation tables may be correct the way our knowledge keeps changing on this!

Break out Space Opera rpg and start rolling…

Well as long as we don't bring any of them into the super-power inducing yellow sun rays of ours, everything will be fine.

It's obvious that they need to find a planet which is totally flat and covered in gravel with jutting rocks made of styrofoam. Like every planet with life forms on Star Trek.

This is sort of a 'well duh' article. There are more Red Dwarfs than any other sort of star, so if life is more than a freak accident here on Earth than statistically most of it will probably be found on planets orbiting the most common stars! :)

-Will

The Truth is out there …

….Sssshhhh!