The Distribution of Stars Most Likely to Harbor Intelligent Life

Details The Distribution of Stars Most Likely to Harbor Intelligent Life The Distribution of Stars Most Likely to Harbor Intelligent Life

Sep 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009asbio...9..617w&link_type=abstract

Astrobiology, Volume 9, Issue 7, pp. 617-621.

Biology

1

Scientific paper

Simple heuristic models and recent numerical simulations show that the probability of habitable planet formation increases with stellar mass. We combine those results with the distribution of main-sequence stellar masses to obtain the distribution of stars most likely to possess habitable planets as a function of stellar lifetime. We then impose the self-selection condition that intelligent observers can only find themselves around a star with a lifetime greater than the time required for that observer to have evolved, Ti. This allows us to obtain the stellar timescale number distribution for a given value of Ti. Our results show that for habitable planets with a civilization that evolved at time Ti = 4.5 Gyr the median stellar lifetime is 13 Gyr, corresponding approximately to a stellar type of G5, with two-thirds of the stars having lifetimes between 7 and 30 Gyr, corresponding approximately to spectral types G0-K5. For other values of Ti the median stellar lifetime changes by less than 50%.

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