In an ironic twist, a team of scientists have used cold hard logic to disprove the existence of a planet that was once suspected to orbit the real-world star that plays host to the fictional planet Vulcan in the Star Trek universe.
Back in 2018, a team of astronomers announced that they had found evidence of a distant "super-Earth" orbiting the largest stellar body in the triple star system 40 Eridani. The revelation triggered a ripple of excitement in the Star Trek community owing to the fact that this particular burning ball of gas — which had been imaginatively named 40 Eridani A — just so happened to be the exact same star around which the Vulcan homeworld orbits in Star Trek lore.
Proof of the planet’s existence came in the form of minute periodic shifts in the star’s light fingerprint, which could indicate a wobble in its trajectory brought on by the gravitational influence of a hidden orbiting planet. Based on their observations, the astronomers estimated that Vulcan’s real-world counterpart likely orbited its star once every 42 days, and had a mass ranging somewhere between that of Neptune and Earth.
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However, a recent study published in The Astronomical Journal has thrown doubt on the existence of the phantom planet by suggesting that the strange light fluctuations at the heart of the 2018 paper were in fact caused by a flickering on the surface of the distant star brought on by localized stellar activity.
For the new study, scientists observed 40 Eridani A with the NEID instrument mounted on the 3.5-meter WIYN telescopes located at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. Using NEID, astronomers are able to keep tabs on the precise movements of the star, while measuring shifts in radial velocity that take place at just 1 kilometre per hour, many light-years from Earth.
The NEID data revealed that the unusual periodic shift in the star’s light was likely caused by surface sunspot activity and the movement of material through layers of the stellar body through convection, rather than the tugging influence of an orbiting planet.
While the news may be disappointing, Star Trek fans can find a silver lining in the knowledge that the next generation of deep space planet hunting techniques will aid in the discovery of countless strange new worlds, owing to their increased precision over the original series of exoplanet tracking tools. In the meantime, read up the communication issues that could prove to be the nemesis of human voyagers in the far future, who are travelling at relitavistic speeds while exploring the final frontier.
Thumbnail credit: JPL, Caltech
Anthony is a freelance contributor covering science and video gaming news for IGN. He has over eight years experience of covering breaking developments in multiple scientific fields and absolutely no time for your shenanigans. Follow him on Twitter @BeardConGamer
