Latest Red dwarf Stories

WASHINGTON, June 3, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA's Hubble Space Telescope will have two opportunities in the next few years to hunt for Earth-sized planets around the red dwarf Proxima Centauri. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The opportunities will occur in October 2014 and February 2016 when Proxima Centauri, the star nearest to our sun, passes in front of two other stars. Astronomers plotted Proxima Centauri's precise path in the heavens and...

[ Watch the Video: Dead Star Warps Light of Red Star ] redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online NASA's Kepler space telescope has observed the effects of a dead star bending the light of its companion star, one of the first detections of this phenomenon in double star systems. The dead star, known as a white dwarf, is the burnt-out core of what used to be a star much like our sun. It is locked in an orbiting pattern with its partner, a small "red dwarf" star, which is...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers using NASA's Kepler space telescope have found that six percent of red dwarf stars have habitable, Earth-like planets. Red dwarfs are considered to be the most abundant stars in our galaxy, so it is feasible that one of these Earth-like planets could be just 13 light-years away, when taking into account the astronomers new research published in The Astrophysical Journal. The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Listen to the podcast “How Planets Form” with redOrbit's Dr. John Millis and planet-hunting expert Dr. Eric Mamajek of the University of Rochester. Astronomers from California Institute of Technology (Caltech) wrote in the Astrophysical Journal that our galaxy may be filled with more planets than researchers had previously thought – a discovery that could have deep implications for our understanding of the universe. The team...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online New planets are discovered by astronomers in strange places, such as orbiting around a brown or white dwarf star. This leads scientists to wonder if they might support life because although neither brown nor white dwarfs are stars like our sun, they both glow and so could be orbited by planets with the right ingredients for life. Although no terrestrial, or earth-like, planets have been confirmed orbiting white or brown dwarf stars,...

[ Watch the Video: New Habitable Zone Super-Earth Found in ExoSolar System ] John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Mankind’s fascination with the possibility of life on other worlds has been a mainstay of science fiction for more than a century. But it wasn’t until the last decade that we possessed the technology to begin searching in earnest for habitable planets outside of our solar system. While the tally of new worlds has seen a surge recently –...

Penn State University astronomers have discovered record-breaking radio waves from an ultra-cool star that is not much warmer than the planet Jupiter. The team used a giant 1,000-feet radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rica to look for radio signals from a class of objects known as brown dwarfs.  Brown dwarf's bridge the gap between gas giant planets, and hydrogen-fusing stars. The astronomers found that a brown dwarf named J1047+21 that lies 33.6 light years away in the constellation...

The astronomers from that European Space Observatory have helped reveal that rocky planets not much bigger than Earth are very common in the habitable zone around faint red stars. A team of astronomers estimates there are tens of billions of these rocky planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and about one hundred in the Sun's neighborhood. The team used observations with the HARPS spectrograph on the telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile. They had been searching for...

Discovery may boost likelihood of existence of habitable planets A team of astronomers led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has discovered the three smallest confirmed planets ever detected outside our solar system. The three planets, which all orbit a single star, are smaller than Earth and appear to be rocky with a solid surface. Until now, astronomers have found at most only four other rocky planets, also called terrestrial planets, around other stars....

Researchers at the University of Warwick have found a unique feuding double white dwarf star system where each star appears to have been stripped down to just its helium.We know of just over 50 close double white dwarfs but this was only the second ever eclipsing close white dwarf pair to be found. The University of Warwick astronomers Steven Parsons and Professor Tom Marsh were able to use the fact that the stars eclipse each other when seen from Earth to make particularly detailed...