Why Don't We Live Around a Red Dwarf?

New research! Join us today as we discuss a new research paper just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences from our team - The Red Sky Paradox.

THANK-YOU to our supporters T. Widdowson, D. Smith, M. Sloan, L. Sanborn, C. Bottaccini, D. Daughaday, A. Jones, S. Brownlee, Z. Star, T. Zanjonc, C. Wolfred, F. Rebolledo, L. Skov, E. Wilson, M. Elliott, B. Daniluk, J. Patrick-Saunders, M. Forbes, S. Vystoropskyi, S. Lee, Z. Danielson, C. Fitzgerald, V. Alexandrov, L. Macchia, C. Souter, M. Gillette, T. Jeffcoat, H. Jensen, F. Linker, J. Rockett, N. Fredrickson, B. Mlazgar, D. Holland, J. Alexander, E. Hanway, J. Molnar, D. Murphree, S. Hannum, T. Donkin, K. Myers, K. Clawson, M. Sanford, P. Matos, S. Hannum, T. Jawad, T. Schnipper, T. Donkin, T. Moss, K. Myers & M. O'Brien.

::Links::

::Music::
► Joachim Heinrich - Arrival
► Falls - Life in Binary
► Joachim Heinrich - Y
► Chris Zabriskie - Cylinder Two
► Chris Zabriskie - Cylinder Five
► Indive - Fusion

::Video clips::
► The Thinker clip by Great Art Explained
► Tea sitirring clip by Chirag Kalelkar
► Cosmology simulation by ESO/L. Calçada/Microsoft WWT
► Sun videos by NASA/SDO
► Roulette clip by steveh552
► Galactic colonization animation by Jonathan Caroll-Nellenback
► Easter Island clips by Easter Island WTM
► Proxima Centauri b animations by ESO/Konstantino Polizois/Nico Bartmann
► Planet formation animation by NCSA, NASA, A. Boley
► Jupiter clip by NASA/SwRI/MSSS/G. Eichstadt/S. Doran
► M-dwarf planet animation by ESO/M. Kornmesser
► HabEX animation by NASA/JPL

::Film clips used::
► The House (2017) - Warner Bros
► Noah (2014) - Paramount Pictures
► Avatar (2009) - 20th Century Fox

::Thumbnail::

::Chapters::
00:00 Prologue
00:39 Paradoxes
03:05 Red Sky Paradox
05:05 Resolution I
10:39 Sponsored section
11:24 Resolution II
12:40 Resolution III
13:38 Resolution IV
16:19 Outro and credits

#RedSkyParadox #Astrobiology #CoolWorlds

[CoolWorldsLab]

Thanks so much for watching everybody, and thanks to our sponsor - head to www.Brilliant.org/CoolWorlds to learn more! Let me know down below which resolution you prefer, and if there are any other apparent cosmic paradoxes that keep *you* awake at night?

[granusko]

You can't even imagine how many times I have refered to your videos while discussing the universe with people (sober or not). Cool Worlds has become my favourite channel and made me even more interested in the universe and everything about it!

[kellysavage]

when I was young, I was enthralled to sit and listen to Carl Sagan for hours. Now there is David Kipping to take his place and enthrall my sense of intrigue and wonderment. Keep up the good work David

[AscendingBliss]

My guess is that most red dwarf stars' heliospheres are not powerful enough to shield their planets from the highly-energetic interstellar medium. It's probably something like standing underneath an umbrella in a rainstorm as opposed to standing underneath a full roof.

Planets orbiting red dwarfs might be close enough to their star to hold liquid water and maybe even a stable climate, and might even be sufficiently shielded from the interstellar medium. But at that range, those planets are probably close enough to their red dwarf to feel the wrath of its problematic mood swings that red dwarfs are notorious for.

[maximaindustria]

My favorite theory is that the red dwarf stars have an equal probability of hosting life with our sun, but that it takes longer for that life to initially emerge. As mentioned, red dwarfs are unstable at the beginning, and the universe is only 13 billion years old. Perhaps yellow stars are simply more conducive to creating life more early in the span of the universe.

[bostonjunk]

I was under the impression that these M dwarf stars flare so frequently and the habitable zones are so close, it would either completely strip any atmosphere away and/or cause it to become tidally locked. I thought this made the idea of habitable planets around them to be a complete no-go?
Would an Earth-sized planet with an Earth-equivalent magnetic field be able to stop an M dwarf star from stripping its atmosphere away from such a close orbit?

[CoolWorldsLab]

And just to answer a common question I’m seeing: isn’t the Sun white? First, the Sun appears yellowish to us when we usually look at it due to a combination of effects such as safe viewing elevations and Rayleigh scattering. So culturally we think of the Sun as yellow. In space it would look closer to white though. A second complication is that when an astronomer says “white dwarf” they’re actually referring to a post main sequence stellar remnant, the Sun is not (yet) a white dwarf so we can’t use that language to describe it because it implies a very different object! For this reason FGKs tend to be referred to as yellow dwarfs (orange for later K types). I didn’t really want to spend too long explaining this in the video because it’s frankly irrelevant to the topic but enough if you asked about this that I wanted to clear it up!

[ravenlord]

My guess is that planets in the Goldilocks zone of red dwarves would be tidal locked (no seasons, no day/night cycle) and would have no or tiny moons (no tides). That's a tough recipe for life, let alone intelligence to emerge.

[nic]

I went camping the other night up in the mountains near Mt. St. Helens in Washington State and thought a lot about the last video about how big the universe is while I was up there. There's nothing quite like staring up in the sky on a clear night with no light pollution and pondering the universe. It's a magical experience.

[violetlight]

I love how you've been thinking of so many topics in astronomy that others seem to ignore, like red dwarf planet's odds of having life, and exomoons. Keep up the great work!

[Matthew...]

Thank you so much for your uploads. It's extremely refreshing to be given well thought-out facts that aren't accompanied with a presenter who also tries to be a comedian to retain my attention... My attention (and probably most people's who enjoy videos like this) is retained by your format.

[dajilus]

Wow I just realized he barely uses any cuts/edits, if any. Usually youtubers have a cut every 5 seconds. Just a naturally talented speaker. Great video as always. Never thought about this question until now, and now I'm intrigued!

[cychotha]

Temporal paucity, but the opposite of what you proposed. All red dwarf systems are young now. Even the oldest are barely to 5% of their lifespans. Our system didn't evolve intelligence till our star was at 80% of it's stable lifespan, and red dwarfs take even longer to settle down.

[indive]

Congrats on new paper! As always, wonderful questions and brilliant thoughts from CoolWorlds.

[ianmathwiz]

Resolution 2 is the one that I immediately thought of, because red dwarfs tend to send out a lot more flares and the habitable zones tend to be a lot closer to the stars and habitable planets are thus more vulnerable to those flares.

[eternalsummer]

I love this channel, it’s got the same kind of flair and standards as David Attenborough or even Brian cox, gives us so much info but leaves us questioning even more, coming away from this channel leaves you in awe of the universe a little more each time

[kries]

Love to see notifications from this channel :)

[thomasturner]

One of social media’s greatest pleasures is seeing Cool Worlds videos say “46 minutes ago”

[theGoogol]

YouTube needs more of this, less of the mindless stuff.

[nirophek]

The solution for your dilemma is quite simple in my opinion. The spectrum of red dwarf is shifted toward less energetic wavelengths. We all are familiar with the necessity of light to excite reactions and we know that life form began in the sea - well - the spectrum of absorption in the ocean is the lowest around 400nm which is also the heights peak of the sun (the emission of red dwarf is 1000nm - which is almost completely absorbed by the oceans themselves). My assumptions are that in order to create life one needs both a solution (i.e. water which allows for chaotic environment) and an exiting force for interatomic/molecular reactions/interactions - a wavelength around 400nm is equivalent to ~3.1eV which is more than enough to allow for redox reactions as well as band gap excitations.