M-Dwarf Planets Are Likely Habitable — But They Would Change Humans In This Weird Way

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There are billions of potentially habitable planets in our galaxy. How do we arrive at this number? The Milky Way has between 100 billion and 400 billion stars.

Seventy percent of these are tiny, cool red dwarfs, also known as M-dwarfs . A detailed exoplanet survey published in 2013 estimated that 41 percent of M-dwarf stars have a planet orbiting in their "Goldilocks" zone, the distance at which the planet has the right temperature to support liquid water.

Rocky planets orbiting in an M-dwarf's habitable zone are called M-Earths. M-Earths differ from our Earth in fundamental ways. For one thing, because M-dwarf stars are much cooler than the Sun, they are close in, which makes the gravitational pull of the star on the planet immensely strong.

The star's gravity pulls harder on the near side of the planet than the far side, creating friction that resists and slows the planet's spin over aeons until spin and orbit are synchronized. This means most M-Earths are probably tidally locked, which is when one hemisphere always faces the Sun while the other always faces away.

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