{"id":18193,"date":"2019-01-08T21:36:16","date_gmt":"2019-01-08T13:36:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/hubble-team-has-bad-news-for-aliens-red-dwarfs-seem-to-wipe-out-lifes-necessities\/"},"modified":"2019-01-08T21:36:16","modified_gmt":"2019-01-08T13:36:16","slug":"hubble-team-has-bad-news-for-aliens-red-dwarfs-seem-to-wipe-out-lifes-necessities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/hubble-team-has-bad-news-for-aliens-red-dwarfs-seem-to-wipe-out-lifes-necessities\/","title":{"rendered":"Hubble team has bad news for aliens: Red dwarfs seem to wipe out life\u2019s necessities"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"AU
An artist\u2019s conception shows the red dwarf star AU Microscopii with a hypothetical planet and moon in the foreground. (NASA \/ ESA Illustration \/ G. Bacon)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Red dwarf stars have been seen as the biggest potential frontier for alien life, in part because they\u2019re the most common stars in our galaxy. But observations made using the Hubble Space Telescope suggest that the frontier might turn out to be a desert.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe may have found the limit to habitable planets,\u201d said Carol Grady, a co-investigator on the Hubble observations from Eureka Scientific in Oakland, Calif. She laid out the research team\u2019s findings today at the American Astronomical Society\u2019s winter meeting in Seattle.<\/p>\n

Red dwarfs, or M-dwarf stars, are much smaller and dimmer than our sun \u2014 but they\u2019re thought to account for 50 to 75 percent of the stars in our Milky Way galaxy. The focus of the Hubble observations is AU Microscopii, or AU Mic, a young red dwarf that\u2019s about 32 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation Microscopium. It\u2019s thought to be a mere 23 million years old.<\/p>\n

Grady and her colleagues used Hubble as well as the European Southern Observatory\u2019s Very Large Telescope in Chile and the XMM-Newton satellite to track what\u2019s been happening to a broad disk of gas and dust surrounding AU Mic \u2014 exactly the kind of disk that gives birth to planets.<\/p>\n

Over the course of several years, the astronomers watched the protoplanetary disk erode as fast-moving blobs of material pushed particles farther out into the void. The international research team, led by the University of Oklahoma\u2019s John Wisniewski, calculated that the disk could be totally cleared out in 1.4 million years.<\/p>\n

\"AU
These two Hubble Space Telescope images, taken in 2011 and 2017, show fast-moving blobs of material sweeping outwardly through a debris disk around the red dwarf star AU Microscopii. (NASA \/ ESA \/ J. Wisniewski \/ C. Grady \/ G. Schneider)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Losing a protoplanetary disk that quickly would be bad news for life\u2019s development, based on Earth\u2019s example.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Earth, we know, formed \u2018dry,\u2019 with a hot, molten surface, and accreted atmospheric water and other volatiles for hundreds of millions of years, being enriched by icy material from comets and asteroids transported from the outer solar system,\u201d another Hubble co-investigator, Glenn Schneider of Arizona\u2019s Steward Observatory, said in a news release.<\/p>\n

Grady said red dwarf seem likely to miss out on that part of the process.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat this suggests is that processes which depend on disk survival may be inhibited in systems around young M-stars,\u201d she said. \u201cThis includes the delivery of water and organics to terrestrial-mass planets in the habitable zone.\u201d<\/p>\n

The findings are in line with previous cautions that seemingly promising red-dwarf planets, including Proxima Centauri b and the TRAPPIST-1 planets, may not actually be habitable even though they\u2019re in orbital zones where liquid water could theoretically exist.<\/p>\n

Grady said more telescope time will be required to nail down the precise mechanism behind the disappearing disk. However, the likeliest scenario has to do with the radiation environment around red dwarfs.<\/p>\n

\u201cM-stars are extremely active,\u201d she said. \u201cIn our week of XMM observations, we got a lot of flares.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, the habitable zones for red-dwarf stars tend to be incredibly close in, which means potentially habitable planets are typically exposed to the \u201cleast benign radiation environment,\u201d Grady said.<\/p>\n

She said AU Mic isn\u2019t an isolated example.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have a couple of other early M-stars where we think we\u2019re looking at the same phenomenon, which has the distinctive feature that the outer portions of their disks look like Swiss cheese,\u201d Grady said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An artist\u2019s conception shows the red dwarf star AU Microscopii with a hypothetical planet and moon in the foreground. (NASA \/ ESA Illustration \/ G. Bacon) Red dwarf stars have been seen as the biggest potential frontier for alien life, in part because they\u2019re the most common stars in our galaxy. But observations made using […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4393,1874,1661,4259,898,4925],"class_list":["post-18193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-aas","tag-astrobiology","tag-astronomy","tag-hubble","tag-hubble-space-telescope","tag-red-dwarfs"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18193"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18193\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}