Spider Star
The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
Read More.Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
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Living on a Planet Orbiting a Red Dwarf Star
April 17th, 2009
There’s a really interesting article over at space.com about prospects for life on planets in the habitable zone of red dwarf stars. Most stars in the galaxy are red dwarf (type M) stars, and will live forever, more or less (hundred billion+ years, much older than the universe’s 14 billion years so far).
I want to pick on one item wrong in the otherwise good story, and then highlight some things I think are really neat.
Here’s the wrong thing, from the very first sentence, which also contains a clue about the correction:
Roughly three quarters of the stars in the galaxy are red dwarfs, but planet searches have typically passed over these tiny faint stars because they were thought to be unfriendly to potential life forms.
Did you see it? The clue is “faint.” These are faint stars and hard to observe with sufficient signal-to-noise ratios to detect planets. The observations are hard enough with brighter stars, and required years of refinements to the techniques to do at all. Let me tell you, the first serious planet hunters like Geoff Marcy and Debra Fisher didn’t skip over M stars because they were thought “unfriendly to potential life forms.” Hell no. I think I even asked Debra about why they didn’t look at the lower mass stars some ten years ago when we shared a night working at Lick Observatory. Anyway, planet hunters started out thrilled to find any planets anywhere around any kinds of stars, and for the most part still haven’t found planets likely to be friendly to be lifeforms. This is quite misleading, but may simply result from not talking to any of the people who actually do the planet searches.
It sounds like, from reading the article, that a viable life-bearing planet around a red dwarf would be either tidally locked or slowly rotating, and that winds would keep the dark side from freezing to ridiculous temperatures. After the first few billion years the intense and frequent flaring would have subsided. The sun would loom large in the sky, perhaps a little orangish rather than blood red. (See what I wrote last year about this in The Red Light District and Part 2: The Light Bulb Paradox).
Anyway, I think such a world would be a tremendously cool setting for science fiction stories, if handled with accurate science.
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