What if Earth orbited a red dwarf?

Most stars in the universe are red dwarfs. But Earth formed around a very different kind of star. So what if our planet had formed around one instead? To receive enough warmth for liquid water, Earth would likely need to orbit much closer to its star. That could expose it to powerful stellar flares, intense radiation and gravitational effects strong enough to reshape the planet’s rotation. The sky would look different. The years would be shorter. Day and night might behave in ways completely unlike what we experience now. And despite red dwarfs living for trillions of years, their early lives can be extraordinarily violent. Could an Earth-like planet still remain habitable? This documentary explores how our planet might have evolved under a very different star to ask: What if Earth had formed around a red dwarf? FOOTAGE & VISUAL CREDITS Credits: ESO | NASA | ESA | ESA/Hubble | M. Kornmesser | Mahdi Zamani | J. Depasquale | L. Calçada | Mark Garlick | N. Bartmann | NAOJ | A. Pagan | A. Riess | ALMA | Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit | GROND | K. Sahu | NRAO | P. McGill | R. Indebetouw | SH0ES team | STScI | University of Warwick | A. Filippenko | A. Levan | A. Martin-Carrillo et al. | A. Nierenberg | A. Reines | A. Roquette | A. Simonnet | Alexandra Angelich | Anthony Meilland | B. Johnson | B. Robertson | BlackHoleCam | CSA | D. Eisenstein | D. Milisavljevic | Digitized Sky Survey 2 | ESO 2.2-metre telescope | F. Millour | F. Vogt et al. | Hubble Heritage Team | HUDF 2012 Team | J. Bally | J. Banovetz | J. Dalcanton | Jordy Davelaar et al. | K. Noll et al. | L. Wheatley | LIGO | M. Rieke | M.-R. Cioni | MPG | MUSE | NSF | NSF's NOIRLab | OmegaCAM | P. Das et al. | R. Ellis | R. Sankrit | Radboud University | S. Brunier | S. Goldman | S. Steinhöfel | S. Tacchella | Sonoma State University | T. Treu | VIMOS | VIRCAM | VISTA | VISTA Magellanic Cloud survey | VLT | VPHAS+ team | VST | W. D. Vacca | Z. Schutte | Zdeněk Bardon MUSIC CREDITS Music by Kevin MacLeod — incompetech.com Additional footage and imagery used under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0). Some assets have been cropped, animated, reframed or captioned for this video. Additionally, public-domain material sourced from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio: svs.gsfc.nasa.gov.