Eyeball Earths  Artist’s concept of a planet where one side
always faces its star, with the dark side covered in ice. Image
Credit: Beau.TheConsortium Alien worlds resembling giant
eyeballs might exist around red dwarf stars, and researchers are
now proposing experiments to simulate these distant planets and
see how capable they are of supporting life.   When looking for
alien life as we know it, scientists typically focus on worlds
that have water, since there is life virtually everywhere there
is water on Earth. As such, they concentrate on the habitable
zone of a star — the area surrounding a star where it is neither
too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on a planet's
surface. Since red dwarfs are so cold, their habitable zones are
often closer than the distance Mercury orbits the Sun. This
makes it relatively easy for astronomers to spot worlds in a red
dwarf's habitable zone — the exoplanets' orbits are small,
meaning they complete them quickly and often, and researchers
can in principle readily