Sorry, I was talking about K-type stars (as in the original query), which as
a rule won't be too far from the Sun masswise. As you say, the extremes do
lie
outside the middle of the main sequence, and they wouldn't be expected to
have habitable planets anyway - again, as you say. But I didn't consider 1.6
x the Sun's mass to be too dissimilar.
Mike
----- > > Star masses (especially those on the main sequence) are confined
within
> > fairly narrow limits, and the Sun makes a good
> > average. Stars with larger volumes have lower densities than the Sun,
and
> > vice versa, so the mass M in Kepler's third law
> > works out to be roughly similar.
>
> Your conception of "roughly similar" would appear to be broader than
mine - main
> sequence stars span a couple of orders of magnitude in each direction from
the
> Sun; from tiny red dwarfs with less than a percent of the Sun's mass to
blue
> giants with dozens of times its mass.
>
> Now, if we restrict ourselves to main sequence stars that are likely to
have
> planets inhabitable for a long time (on an evolutionary time scale), the
> variation is much smaller. Exactly how much smaller depends on exactly you
> consider to be sufficiently sun-like to support earth-style life, but
unless
> you're very pessimistic on this point, we're still looking at a fairly big
> spread - well above what I'd consider roughly similar.
>
> Andreas