It seems that the potential for the habitability of planets near red dwarf stars just lowered quite a lot. Everything suggests that these planets are being barbecued by many stellar eruptions
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Red dwarfs are by far the most common stars in the Milky Way and most likely even in other galaxies. Compared to other stars they are small, cold, and seem to often have planets around them. That’s why it is important to find out how habitable these worlds could be.
One of the key pieces of information we need to get is how the red dwarf stellar weather affects the habitability of the planets around them. We already knew that these stars tend to be quite moody. In some cases, they fire off one devastating stellar eruption after another completely wrecking nearby planets.
Andrew Zic from the University of Sydney and his coworkers are the first to conclusively confirm a tight correlation between stellar eruptions in the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum and radio-bursts in another star than the Sun itself.
That has serious implications for observing stellar weather in far away stars. Now we can start to deduce stellar weather from detected radio-signals of a given star.
The researchers used the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) in Western Australia, the Zadko telescope at the University and Western Australia, and also other devices to observe the signals of our nearest red dwarf that is also the closest star to Earth – Proxima Centauri.
The results of this research are fascinating. But they are also a bit of a cold shower for those who hoped in habitable planets in the Goldilocks zone at Proxima Centauri and other habitable areas at other red dwarf stars as all suggests that these planets are being barbecued by common stellar eruptions.
The problem is that red dwarfs are much colder and much less bright than – for example – our Sun. That’s why their Goldilocks zone – the zone where liquid water could exist – is much closer to the star than is the case with Sun. That also means such a planet is a much easier target for stellar eruptions and similar events that are caused by the red dwarfs' activity.
The results are that the planets in the Goldilocks zone of red dwarfs such as Proxima Centauri and its planet Proxima Centauri b most likely have their atmosphere damaged if not destroyed and their surface is constantly radiated by x-ray and UV radiation. And that’s not exactly the ideal environment for life.
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