Habitable Planets Orbiting Red Dwarfs? Unlikely...

-
Many billions of rocky planets in the habitable zones around red dwarfs in the Milky Way:

"Our new observations with HARPS mean that about 40% of all red dwarf stars have a super-Earth orbiting in the habitable zone where liquid water can exist on the surface of the planet," says Xavier Bonfils (IPAG, Observatoire des Sciences de l'Univers de Grenoble, France), the leader of the team. "Because red dwarfs are so common — there are about 160 billion of them in the Milky Way — this leads us to the astonishing result that there are tens of billions of these planets in our galaxy alone."

However the circumstellar habitable zone of a red dwarf is much closer to the host star than our system. And with that you would have a planet in which the rotation = revoltion (as with our Moon). That means one side will always face the star and the other will remain dark. The side facing the star will be too hot and the dark side will be too cold.

So if scientists want to find habitable planets they need to forget about red dwarfs as a host star.