Red Dwarf Life

Red Dwarfs are the most numerous stars in the galaxy, with over 75% of all stars in this category. The number of these stars are large and provide good targets to search for planets. Life as we know it needs a liquid substance in which to work, here on earth it is liquid water. In order for liquid water to exist in a red dwarf system it must be fairly close to the star. We can expand our search for extraterrestrial life by researching other liquid modes in which it could work.

Our planet is not the only world in this solar system that has liquid on its surface. Titan, a moon of Saturn, exists in the liquid methane habitable zone. Methane is known as a gas on earth, a fairly volatile one. Methane is only explosive when it co-exists with oxygen. On Titan, it forms a hydrolic cycle much like water does on Earth. There are seas, river valleys and methane soaked sediments from rain.



Seas of methane on titan.

There could be many titan like worlds around the abundant red dwarfs. The liquid methane habitable zone for a red dwarf world is from around half of an AU or a full AU. An AU being the distance between earth and the sun. Worlds here would be uninhabitable by our standards, but not to something with their own standards. A world could have vast oceans of liquid methane with water ice operating as a base rock. It could be a virtual mirror of earth, only with alternative substances.

I imagine life and a civilization could arise in a similar way it did here. The visible light at a world like this is quite dim, so I would image that an alien species would evolve to use infrared light to see. Red dwarfs give out 10 times more infrared energy than visible energy. If the world has a large amount of haze like titan one would think that the opportunity for astronomy would be lost for a civilization, the stars would be blocked out like on an overcast night. While this would be true for individuals using visible light, infrared light does not get blocked out like visible light does. I suspect that aliens using infrared are able to see the stars just fine, maybe even better than we can.

Life on a titan world could be just as diverse as it on here, though it would probably use a metabolize differently and perhaps move slowly. I suspect hat anything like plants could use the abundant infrared light to perform some operation like photosynthesis.