
Whoops...
Anyone else have a brainfart moment and read this as:-
...orbiting a red dwarf star in the constellation of Cletus.
Don't think I'd be wanting to visit somehow.
Story no longer published.
Sure, it's a huge distance by everyday standards, and we won't be able to get any probes over there any time soon, but as interstellar distances go, that's practically a next-door neighbour, and it'll be MUCH easier to investigate that system with our telescopes than ones hundreds or thousands of ly away.
I look forward to further news on LHS 1140!
Why do exobiologist/astroboffins insist on the 'goldilocks zone' thing. We are, after all, talking about alien life. The rulebook doesn't state that alien life must have DNA as a base code, it doesn't insist that the temperature should be like an average day on the beach at Brighton, or that water has to be involved, does it.
I'm not just talking extremophiles here (which we know can and do exist on our own planet), but exoticophiles - things like bugs that use solvents other than water, thingymajigs that operate at cryogenic temperatures utilising superfluidity and superconductivity, gassy bags of ephemeral catalysts floating in Jupiter like skies, organised magneto-creatures feeding off of a star's chromosphere... I could go on and on and on