Recent results suggest that red dwarf stars may have habitable planets after all. Summary article in New Scientist. These stars are much more common than G-type stars like the sun, and moreover, previous attempts at searching for life (such as looking for radio waves or for looking for planets that show signs of oxygen) has focused on G-type stars. The basic idea of this new result is that water ice will more effectively absorb radiation from red dwarfs (due to the infrared wavelengths that much of their output occurs in) allowing planets which are farther from the red dwarf to have higher temperatures.
The main context that this is relevant to LW is that this is increasing the set of star systems with a potential for life by a large factor. There are around 5 times as many red dwarfs as there are stars like our sun, but the direct increase isn’t by a factor of five since red dwarfs were known to have a habitable zone, it was just considered to be small and close to the star. We’ve already discussed recent results which suggest that a large fraction of G-type stars have planets in their habitable zones, but this potentially swamps even that effect. In that thread, many people suggested that they already assumed that habitable planets were common, but this seems to suggest that they are even more common than anyone was thinking.
This may force an update to putting more of the great filter ahead of us.
Recent results suggest that red dwarf stars may have habitable planets after all. Summary article in New Scientist. These stars are much more common than G-type stars like the sun, and moreover, previous attempts at searching for life (such as looking for radio waves or for looking for planets that show signs of oxygen) has focused on G-type stars. The basic idea of this new result is that water ice will more effectively absorb radiation from red dwarfs (due to the infrared wavelengths that much of their output occurs in) allowing planets which are farther from the red dwarf to have higher temperatures.
The main context that this is relevant to LW is that this is increasing the set of star systems with a potential for life by a large factor. There are around 5 times as many red dwarfs as there are stars like our sun, but the direct increase isn’t by a factor of five since red dwarfs were known to have a habitable zone, it was just considered to be small and close to the star. We’ve already discussed recent results which suggest that a large fraction of G-type stars have planets in their habitable zones, but this potentially swamps even that effect. In that thread, many people suggested that they already assumed that habitable planets were common, but this seems to suggest that they are even more common than anyone was thinking.
This may force an update to putting more of the great filter ahead of us.