Is Proxima B Habitable? Red Dwarf Stellar Eruptions May Have Made Closest Earth-Like Planet Ill-Suited For Life, Study Suggests

Life, as we currently understand it, is fragile. A lot of things need to be just right for life on a planet to emerge — the most important among them being a planet’s distance from its parent star — and several others need to be at an optimum level for it to thrive and evolve.

This is why astronomers looking for signs of life beyond the solar system limit their hunt to planets located in the “Goldilocks zone” of a star — a region where the temperature is just right for liquid water to exist.