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For Alien Hunters, Two Suns May Be Better Than One
Planets with two parent stars face a double whammy of radiation, a situation that would seemingly make them far less suitable for life than single-star systems.
New research suggests that the gravitational arm-wrestling by a pair of suitably positioned parent stars should carve out a magnetically protected habitable zone for an orbiting brood.
“We need to be more open-minded when thinking about habitability of a significant fraction of the stars in the galaxy that are in binary systems that could provide enhanced habitability conditions,” astronomer Jorge Zuluaga with the Institute of Physics at the University of Antioquia in Colombia, told Discovery News.
What goes into the detection of worlds orbiting other stars dozens of light-years away?
