The Search For Life NASA the habitable zone

 

There's a helpful concept we use to help understand what distance from a given star you might expect to find planets with liquid water on their surface – liquid water being essential for life as we know it. It's called the habitable zone. Every star has a habitable zone, but where that zone lies is different for stars of different sizes and brightness. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

When searching for possibly habitable exoplanets, it helps to start with worlds similar to our own. But what does “similar” mean? Many rocky planets have been detected in Earth’s size-range: a point in favor of possible life. Based on what we’ve observed in our own solar system, large, gaseous worlds like Jupiter seem far less likely to offer habitable conditions. But most of these Earth-sized worlds have been detected orbiting red-dwarf stars; Earth-sized planets in wide orbits around Sun-like stars are much harder to detect.

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