Charles Lada Quotations

The population of the galaxy is really dominated by these very faint small stars.

This new planet may just be the tip of the iceberg. Red dwarfs may be a fertile new hunting ground for finding planets, including ones similar in mass to the earth.

By assembling these pieces of the puzzle, the picture that emerged was the complete opposite of what most astronomers have believed.

It depends on how you count. If you have 80 billion of what we call primaries, and you have 25 percent in multiple stars, then about 20 billion red dwarfs are in these binary systems, but another 60 billion are single. It's not often appreciated how numerous they are, but they are the most numerous of all stars.

Red dwarfs can live maybe a trillion years or so. Since the beginning of the universe, the red dwarfs that have formed, none of them have died.

Whether planets around these stars could be Earth-like would depend on orbital distance. There have been extensive studies and it turns out these planets would have to be pretty close to their stars, although it would depend on the mass of the stars.

There are theories that can form binary stars and theories that can form single stars, but there none that explain why you form more singles than binaries.