Space is “vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big,” as the author Douglas Adams put it, and those gargantuan dimensions present a colossal roadblock in the search for alien life beyond Earth. Even if our own Milky Way galaxy is currently teeming with extraterrestrial beings, their worlds could be scattered thousands of light years distant from each other, passing blindly like cosmic ships in the night.
But what if the key obstacle to detecting alien pen pals is not spatial, but rather temporal? That’s one of the questions posed by a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
Led by astrophysicist and professor Avi Loeb, who chairs the department of astronomy at Harvard University, the paper charts out the probability of life’s emergence from the birth of the first stars 30 million years after the Big Bang to the death of the last stars trillions of years into the future. Loeb’s team focused on “life as we know it,” meaning terrestrial organisms on a rocky planet with liquid water, within the habitable zone of its star.
The results suggested that low-mass red dwarf stars are the most likely candidates for hosting habitable planets, thanks to their extreme longevity. These slow burners are only about ten percent as massive as yellow dwarfs like the Sun, but they outlive Sunlike stars thousands of times over.
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