Hubble Discovers two Exo-Planets Circling Red Dwarf

(CNN) — For a craft that was launched in 1990, Hubble  continues to provide us with awe-inspiring firsts. This time, In May, researchers discovered three Earth-like worlds orbiting an ultracool red dwarf star 40 light-years away.

Red dwarf stars are at the end of the range of what is classified as a star. These stars are half the temperature and a 10th the mass of the sun, so it was a first to find planets orbiting this star which also appeared to be in the "habitable zone" of the star, meaning liquid water could pool on their surfaces. 

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NASA Discovers First Earth-sized Planet in Habital Zone

 

In a startling discovery, astronomer Thomas Barclay from Nasa’s Ames Research Center in Palo Alto, California 

• has discovered a habitable planet almost the same size as Earth orbiting an unidentified star in its so-called Goldilocks zone - a region around the star that emits just enough energy, light and temperature for liquid surface water to appear. 

The planet's data was captured by the Kepler space telescope.  The planet was observed indirectly while orbiting an unnamed M1 dwarf star better known as red dwarfs.   

From the article:

These are much smaller and dimmer than Earth’s sun, and aren’t bright enough to be seen with the naked eye. Also  these stars make up around 70 per cent of all the stars in the galaxy.Barclay made the discovery using data collected by the Kepler space telescope. The planet sits on the outer edge of its star's habitable zone.

Check out the complete facinating article Here

Like grains of sand...these are the red dwarfs in our skies...

Dan sends in an article by the "amateur naturalist" Dana Wilde commenting on how our view of the universe has changed in less than a hundred years. I just can't resist beating around some of the ideas that Wilde brings up.

Who doesn't remember Carl Sagan's Cosmos? Sagan would often make a pronouncement of scale that was totally astounding. I can clearly remember Sagan in the early 80s proclaiming that there are more stars than grains of sand on the beaches of Earth. Now one astronomer trying to put a number to Sagan's pronouncement estimated that there are about 2000 billion billion grains of sand on Earth. That's a serious haul of stars by anyone's estimate.

In amongst the visible class of stars are, for lack of a better label, ghost stars. Stars so small, dim and cool as to be all but invisible under most detection methods. Red Dwarf stars and no one could come up with a reasonable amount of these "ghost stars'. Recently Yale astronomers determined that there are many more of red Dwarf stars than anyone thought possible. Yale astronomers detected the light from red dwarf stars in the spectra of large elliptical galaxies and from this determined that red dwarfs account for around 60% of the mass (star mass) of those galaxies. That is triple what was previously thought to exist!

What is even wilder about red dwarfs is just how slow they age. Because they are relatively cool and very small these stars burn their fuel very slowly. So slowly in fact that the present universe is not old enough for red dwarf stars to grow "old". Which when you come to think about it means that virtually every red dwarf that present at creation of the universe, is still burning 13+ billion years later!

Bangor Daily News article

Could This Be Where Some of the Universe's Missing Mass is?

Oh and the first person that calls the show Saturday and says...what? You reach into your back pocket?!" gets hung up on! lol Ok, here is what I am basing this question on. Astronomers used to think that elliptical galaxies contained around a trillion stars each. But looking at new data, they believe that these types of galaxies actually contain five trillion to ten trillion stars, and that by itself means the universe would have three times as many stars as we'd previously believed.

The new data come from technological advancements in detecting much dimmer stars or red dwarfs. Up until recently, red dwarf stars have been extremely difficult to detect because they are extremely dim in nature. Now that astronomers can detect the red dwarfs it turns out red dwarfs are way more common than was previously believed. Elliptical galaxies contain around 20 times as many of them as our own galaxy and could turn out to make up 80 percent of all stars in the universe. This could mean there's less "dark matter" than previously thought, since these red dwarfs could account for a lot of the universe's missing mass.

IO9 red dwarf article Wiki Red Dwarf article
Thanks to Dan for bringing the article to my attention