Red dwarfs generally have not been considered viable candidates for hosting habitable planets. Since red dwarfs are small and dim, the habitable zone surrounding them — the region where an orbiting planet's surface water can remain liquid — is relatively close to them.

"The habitable zone would be very, very small. Consequently, the chances that you would actually find any planet at the right distance from the sun to be attractive to life was likely to be small, too," said Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in Mountain View, Calif.

But the study, based on data from the European Space Agency's HARPS spectrograph in Chile, used a sample of 102 red dwarfs to estimate that 41 percent of the dim stars might be hiding planets in their habitable zone.

"The number of habitats might increase by a factor of 8 or 10," Shostak told SPACE.com.

If they're smart, they'll steer well clear of here.

"Bleezlethorp! Put out the lights! Humans are coming and I don't want them to see that we're home!"

QFT!!!

We do not need to find life beyond earth. If there is anyone out there, I hope we never find them and that they never find us.

It's a shame we'll probably never find out if there's other life out there.

We won't. Our descendants might. Our species has a tradition of figuring out how to do things that we think are impossible.

That's generally true, but has limits. We might not know what those limits are, but they're there.

Prove it.

I admit we've spent at least a fifth of recorded history regressing technologically before starting up again and taking off exponentially, but it could have played out worse.

If we built a spaceship today that could accelerate constantly at 1g, any one of us could conceivably land on the other side of the universe within our lifetimes (less than 50 years).