"Trillions of Earths Orbiting Red Dwarfs" - Presence in Universe Tripled by New Discovery -

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"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, summarizing 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."

 

The results determined that there are about 20 times more red dwarfs in elliptical galaxies than there are in the Milky Way, explained Charlie Conroy of Hardvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. This also means that these galaxies may contain less dark matter than was previously measured, since more space is filled with the mass of these red dwarfs.

Since the number of stars is now known to be more bountiful, the number of planets orbiting red dwarfs is also elevated. This, of course, also raises the number of possible life-harboring planets there might be, van Dokkum added.
As a matter of fact, the recently discovered exoplanet, which astronomers believe is capable of sustaining life, orbits the red dwarf star named Gliese 581.

Red dwarfs have been prime hunting grounds in the search for Earth's Twin. Extrasolar planets were discovered orbiting Gliese 581 in 2005, about the mass of Neptune, or sixteen Earth masses. It orbits just 6 million kilometers (0.04 AU) from its star, and is estimated to have a surface temperature of 150 °C, despite the dimness of the star.

So far, among the 500 plus exo-planets discovered none have shown themselves to be twin Earths. But, in the next two to three years NASA’s Kepler space telescope will provide the statistical bedrock for estimating the number of Earth clones in the galaxy.