Last February, seven exoplanets about the size of Earth were discovered orbiting a
dwarf star 39 light-years away from us.
Red
dwarf stars are the longest-lived of all the stars.
White
dwarf stars, the compact remnants left behind when stars like the Sun reach the end of their lives are an ideal natural laboratory to test this idea.
Kepler casts its gaze on around 158,000 stars and, based on the analysis by Dressing and her team, the telescope has identified 95 planetary candidates orbiting red
dwarf stars.
The estimate, contained in a study published online Wednesday in the journal Nature, is based on findings that there are many more red
dwarf stars the most common star in the universe -- than once thought.
"Once they discovered that there was a class of stars really big, called giants, they carved the universe up into dwarfs and giants," says Jim Holberg, a scientist who studies
dwarf stars at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
They have investigated 500 white
dwarf stars and it's the only one like it they've found.
Scattered among the galaxy are brown
dwarf stars, capable of producing energy to heat colonizing stations and power starships.
There are many candidates for dark matter, including undetected brown
dwarf stars, white
dwarf stars, black holes, or neutrinos with mass (a neutrino is a fundamental nuclear particle that is electrically neutral and of much smaller mass, if any at all, than an electron).
Then, there are those paradigm-makers and -breakers who search the void for
dwarf stars and black holes, of which the only evidence is the flecks of light that elegant calculations transform into mathematical wonders.
Astronomers have discussed theories about the possibility of crystallized white
dwarf stars for decades.