This is scientific American's 60 second science.

I'm Christopher Intagliata.

As astronomers hunt for habitable earth-like worlds,

one popular place to look is around M- stars, a type of red dwarf.

Couple reasons for that.

First of all, most of the stars in our galaxy are like this.

Aikigunter is an astronomer at the Turringer State Observatory in Germany.

And secondly, the closest stars to us are like this.

And thirdly, it's relatively easy to find planets around them which have a low mass or small diameter.

M-stars are smaller and fainter than our sun,

meaning the zone around them where liquid water could exist,

the habitable zone, is really close in.

And in that region around the star,

it's also easier to spot small exoplanets

with current techniques.

A few months back, Gunter had his telescope

trained on an M-star 16 light years away, known as AD Leonis, when he spotted a huge

stellar flare. A Neptune-sized giant exoplanet lurking around the star appears to have survived unscathed.

But the event inspired Gunter and his team to ask how that huge flare would have affected a hypothetical

Earth-sized exoplanet orbiting the same star, so they ran a computer simulation. The result, a shower of

x-rays thousands of times stronger than what the sun unleashes on the Earth would have blasted

away much of the imaginary exoplanets protective ozone.

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