THEY’RE THE MOST COMMON STAR in the universe. We know of hundreds of rocky exoplanets orbiting them. And as a result, RED DWARF STARS ARE PRIME TARGETS for scientists’ ongoing search for life in the universe.
But David Kipping, an astronomy professor at Columbia University, is not convinced red dwarfs are quite so ripe for alien life.
“It’s just a question that has always perplexed me,” Kipping tells Inverse. “If they’re so numerous, so long-lived, potentially trillions of years, and so they really seem to have everything going for them ... it's kind of odd then that we don’t live around a red dwarf.”
In a new paper, Kipping presented the “red sky paradox,” the curious question where red dwarf stars rank the highest for potentially habitable star systems, and yet here we are, orbiting a larger yellow star.
The paper, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,presents resolutions to the paradox and explores whether life on Earth is an outlier or a common occurrence based on the habitability of the worlds that orbit around red dwarf stars.
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