Finding aliens means studying new sorts of planet
But the places extraterrestrial life can be looked for are not the places it is most likely to thrive
On September 12th, at a conference on life in the universe hosted by Harvard University, David Charbonneau, an astronomer at that same university, gave a talk titled “The terrestrial planets of the smallest and closest stars”. The unofficial title, as revealed on his second slide, was “Small angry stars and the many godforsaken rocks which orbit them”.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “An alternative to godforsaken rocks?”
From the September 23rd 2023 edition
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