 Exoplanets are a dime a dozen. Everybody's finding them nowadays. And a recent study by the European Southern Observatory has actually found an exoplanet that may have the perfect conditions for habitability on its surface. And this is your space pod for Thursday, November 23, 2017. So what's the big deal? We always find a handful of these exoplanets that could potentially have life on them every year. Well, the thing about this one is that it's orbiting a very specific star that actually allows the possibility of life to occur. Now, you'll recall back in August of 2016, the European Southern Observatory announced they found a planet around Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our sun, only 4.3 light years away from us. And that planet was sitting in the habitable zone. Then in February of this year, NASA announced the discovery of the Trappist-1 system, seven planets, with three sitting in the habitable zone. Now, these are all excellent discoveries of triumph of instrumentation, analysis, and human effort. But really, the biggest problem is that these stars that they orbit aren't type known to have volumes of radiation coming off of them and also propensity towards flaring and flaring a lot. This means that the planets going around them are likely to be irradiated beyond what we consider ideal for life as we know it. Does that mean life could possibly survive there? Well, life is tough. We know that just from studying life here on Earth, but its chances of surviving are slimmer than we'd actually like to consider. Well, here comes our friends at the ESO again, releasing a paper titled A Temperate Exo Earth Around a Quiet M. Dwarf at 3.4 Parsecs. What does that mean? Well, this tells us that the paper is about a rocky planet orbiting around Ross 128, a red dwarf star only 10.8 light years away. And this terrestrial planet is within Ross 128's habitable zone. That makes this especially exciting, specifically because Ross 128 is an M-class red dwarf star. This means that surface temperature is cooler than most other stars, somewhere around 3,000 degrees Celsius. Now, M-class red dwarf stars also have a very quiet nature. They rarely flare and they don't put out as much radiation as our sun. Now that planet in orbit, which we currently call Ross 128B, orbits just a paltry 7 million kilometers from the star with an orbital period of just under 10 days. But because Ross 128 is an M-class dwarf star, rather cool, that planet only receives about 30% more radiation than we do here on Earth. And the surface temperatures of that planet would be expected to hover anywhere from negative 60 Celsius at the poles to about 20 degrees Celsius in the equatorial regions. Now, of course, a lot of this, we need to take a grain of salt with it, because we currently don't have the instrumentation to confirm a lot of these details. A lot of what we're saying about Ross 128B is based on models. But it's exciting, as within a few years with the James Webb Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatories very well named extremely large telescope coming online, we're going to be entering into an era where we won't just be detecting exoplanets, we'll actually be characterizing them, studying their atmospheres and potentially figuring out what may be on their surfaces. And most importantly from the study, M-class dwarf stars are the most populous type of star in the universe. They make up 70% of the stars in spiral galaxies and 90% of the stars in elliptical galaxies. So to find things like this gives us a lot of hope for the potential of life beyond our solar system. So don't forget to like and subscribe to us here on tomorrow, and you can also do the little bell if you want to, to get notifications when we drop new videos throughout the week. And of course, don't forget to tune in every Saturday at 1800 coordinated universal time for our live shows. There's nothing quite like watching it live. It's one thing to watch it on YouTube, but when you see it happening, that's where the real magic happens. So until the next space pod, keep exploring.