Sorry About the Time Change

Planet-hunting astronomers started out in the 90’s by searching for alien worlds around Sun-like stars. It made sense: the only planets we knew of at the time orbited the actual Sun, so why not look in a familiar kind of place? More recently, attention has moved to the much smaller and dimmer stars known as red dwarfs, or M-dwarfs: not only are they far more numerous than Sun-like G stars, but they’re less bright too. Any Earth-like planet in orbit around them would be less likely to be washed out in their glare and thus more likely to be spotted.

But now an even smaller and stranger class of stars has been floated as perhaps the best place to search, not only for mirror Earths, but for the existence of life itself.

Read more: http://science.time.com/2013/03/06/could-tiny-stars-be-home-to-mirror-earths/#ixzz2MoloKt6P