We have an update on where to look for life from the Goldilocks project. Led by Ed Guinan and Scott Engle, this Villanova University project is working to define where life is most likely to exist, and by the numbers the answer appears to be around K stars. Slightly cooler than our Sun, and a lot more common, these orange stars don’t go through as prolonged a period of violence as red dwarf stars, and because they are larger, they have a larger habitable zone. With the inner edge of these habitable regions much farther from the surface of these less violent stars, this team finds planets would get about 1/100th as much deadly radiation as similar worlds in orbit around active M-dwarfs. 

So – if you want to rationally search for life, around K-dwarfs, not FRBs, are the places you need to go look.

In talking about habitable zones, we are generally referring to the regions around stars where liquid water can exist on the surface of a planet because it receives enough light from its star to melt ice, but not so much that all that water evaporates away. As we look around our solar system, we’re realizing that physics and geology have teamed up to create liquid water in many other ways.

See the press release at:

Goldilocks Stars are the best places to look for life (Hubblesite)