Free Republic

While small, cool, and relatively dim compared to our Sun, red dwarf star systems are where many of the most recent and promising exoplanet finds have been made. These include Proxima b, the seven rocky planets orbiting TRAPPIST-1, and the super-Earth discovered around LHS 1140b. Unfortunately, red dwarf stars pose a bit of a problem when it comes to habitability. In addition to being variable in terms of the light they put out, they also known for being unstable. According to a new study by a team of scientists – which was presented the this week at the annual meeting...

Fourteen billion years after the Big Bang started it all, there is still life in the old cosmos. Astronomers announced yesterday that they had discovered three dozen baby galaxies in what passes for nearby space in the universe - two billion to four billion light-years distant. The galaxies, which are blossoming with new stars at a prodigious rate, resemble the infant Milky Way 10 billion years ago, the astronomers said. Studying these new galaxies could give cosmologists new insights into the processes by which galaxies and stars first formed out of clouds of primordial gas and dust at the beginning...