WHITE DWARFS ARE THEY THE KEY TO LIFE?

Picture a planet that hosts life elsewhere in the universe. The kind where aliens wander around on its surface, going about their daily business much like you or I. What kind of planet comes to mind? Normally the answer is one very much like the Earth because our planet sits in a temperature sweet spot. We’re not too close to the Sun that we boil, nor too far that we freeze. Astronomers call it the Goldilocks zone because, like the porridge in the classic fairy tale, conditions are just right. Ideal for the all-important liquid water that is crucial to the existence of every life form on the planet.

For that reason much of our work to look for life beyond our Solar System has centred on the search for Goldilocks planets around stars like our Sun. Yet if recent research is anything to go by, we could be making a fairly sizeable mistake. “We could be missing a prime spot because of our own biases,” says Paul Sutter of Stony Brook University in New York. Perhaps the best