Searching for habitable planets has occupied the minds of scientists for years. Part of the motivation for seeking out and gathering data on exoplanets is to check for an ideal environment for life and potential signs that something may live there. In the 20-plus years that scientists have been studying exoplanets, however, they have yet to find unmistakable signs of current life. But what they have been able to do is identify four types of exoplanets: gas giants, Neptunians, super-Earths and terrestrials. Or at least that was the case before Rafael Luque at the University of Chicago and Enric Pallé at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias began their study. “I’d been researching my PhD thesis, which looked at discovering new planets orbiting M dwarf stars,” Luque tells All About Space, referring to the smallest, coolest stars that, aside from boasting just a fifth of the Sun’s mass, are the most populous type of stars. “These stars make it easier to see small planets around them because they too are small, as well as lighter. But we found a surprising result.”
As the scientists began using different telescopes to measure the exoplanets orbiting in close proximity to the M dwarfs, they decided to focus less on individual bodies and more
