A professor at Penn State’s Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds has discovered a binary star system comprising a pair of brown dwarf stars, just 6.5 light years from the Sun. In astronomical terms, the new system is in Earth's backyard.
A new estimate of habitable planets orbiting red dwarf stars, considered the most common in our galaxy, indicates there may be "tens of billions" of rocky planets like our Earth in the Milky Way galaxy alone and about 100 in the Sun's neighborhood.
