Planets orbiting close to type-M dwarf stars are in the habitable zone, but if their orbits are in a 3:2 spin resonance, do their long, strange days and nights have a chance of supporting photosynthetic life?
There’s a new space telescope on the block, which just might find as many new planet candidates as the Kepler mission.
The census of planets for smaller stars—M dwarfs—is now basically complete. In this paper, Courtney Dressing and Dave Charbonneau use this M dwarf advantage to determine the occurrence rate of small planets around M dwarfs.
In everyday life, measuring distances is easy. In astronomy, however, accurate distance measurements are complicated by a whole host of factors. These authors are improving methods to determine the distance to small M Dwarf stars.