A new study has revealed that ruthless space weather might damage the atmosphere of any planet in the red dwarf star's habitable zone trajectory.
Ofer Cohen of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said that the red-dwarf planet faces an extreme space environment in addition to other stresses like tidal locking.
A planet in the red-dwarf habitable zone would have to be much closer to its star than the Earth is to the Sun since it is smaller, and the temperature is warm enough for liquid water and as a result, such a planet would be subjected to severe space weather.
The researchers found that even an Earth-like magnetic field could not necessarily protect a habitable-zone world from the star's continuous stellar wind bombardment.
Co-author Jeremy Drake explained that the space environment of close-in exoplanets was much more extreme than what the Earth faces, and the ultimate consequence was that any planet potentially would have its atmosphere stripped over time.
The extreme space weather would also generate spectacular aurora, or Northern Lights that could be 100,000 times stronger than those on Earth and extend from the poles halfway to the equator.
