The nearest star to our sun that we know of is Proxima Centauri, a Red Dwarf star that is 4.2 light years away. Our sun is a Yellow Dwarf, it will die in 5 billion years time and it will become too hot and unstable to for earth in half that time; 2.5 billion years is still a very long time though. Red Dwarf stars are much smaller than our Yellow Dwarf Sun, they last more than 100 billion years; our universe is 13 billion years old, this means every single Red Dwarf star that has ever formed in the universe is still very young, they burn their hydrogen so slowly that they are all still in the main sequence. No one knows what they will do when they leave the main sequence stage. Maybe they will shine brightly like our Sun for 5 billion years perhaps they will explode, we don't know. No one knows what Red Dwarf stars do when they get old and die because they are all young.
The problem with red dwarf stars is a planet needs to be very close to the star for liquid water to exist on the surface, when a planet is just a few million kilometres from their star, they get tidally locked so one side always faces the star and one always faces away, like our moon. I thought to myself, what if you had a Jupiter sized planet just 5 million kilometres from a red dwarf with a Earth sized moon, the Earth sized moon would be tidally locked to the Jupiter sized planet instead of the star and the magnetic field of the gas giant would protect the moon planet from super flares. The Earth like moon wouldn't be tidally locked to the nearby star so it wouldn't have one side of the planet like an oven and the other like a freezer. Just a thought.
Then I had many other thoughts in my head, Alpha Centauri A will die long before Proxima, how will that affect the nearby star? When Yellow Dwarf Stars die they spurt out a lot of Hydrogen into space, perhaps some of the Hydrogen will fall into Proxima and increase it's mass. Could a Red Dwarf Star grow into an Orange Dwarf Star if material falls into it? I don't know.
