"Trillions of Earths Orbiting Red Dwarfs"

"There are possibly trillions of Earths orbiting these stars." -Yale University astronomer Pieter van Dokkum,

Van Dokkum also said that the red dwarfs they have discovered are over 10 billion years old, which means they've had enough time for complex life to develop and evolve, van Dokkum added about research recently conducted at Hawaii's Keck Observatory that discovered that the number of stars in the universe is triple what was previously thought. Until recently, red dwarf stars were not detectable in galaxies outside our own nearby cluster because they are relatively small and dim. Thus, researchers were not able to comprise a total number of red dwarfs present in the universe.

However, astronomers are now able to observe nearby elliptical galaxies using powerful telescopes at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. These instruments were able to detect the faint signatures of red dwarf stars in eight massive ellipticals that lie about 50,000 and 300 million light-years away.

In their observations, the scientists realized that red dwarfs were much more abundant than they had expected.

"No one knew how many of these stars there were," said van Dokkum, who led the research in this study.

"Different theoretical models predicted a wide range of possibilities, so this answers a longstanding question about just how abundant these stars are."


more

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/12/trillions-of-earths-orbiting-red-dwarfs-presence-in-universe-tripled-by-new-discovery-.html#more