An international team of astronomers, led by the University of Göttingen's Guillem Anglada-Escudé, claims to have identified a certain type of star that may be circled by significantly more habitable planets than researchers generally expect to find. Such stars are smaller than our Sun, requiring that habitable planets orbit close to them because of their lower mass. That makes planets cluster together, allowing them to be more easily spotted now that researchers know to look for them. "Instead of observing 10 stars to look for a single potentially habitable planet, we now know we can look at just one star and find several of them," Rory Barnes, a member of the research team, explained in a statement.