• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Turns Out Star Trek’s Planet Vulcan Doesn’t Exist After All

March 10, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

A few years ago, astronomers excitedly shared the news that a candidate exoplanet was spotted around star 40 Eridani A, which has a particular significance for fans of Star Trek. It’s the system that hosts Vulcan, the world where Spock, T’Pol, and countless other characters come from – but it seems that the planet will have to remain a work of fiction.

The existence of 40 Eridani b – Vulcan – has been in question for a while. Its existence was claimed based on a technique known as radial velocity. As a planet orbits a star, its gravity tugs at it, creating a wobble in its light. This has been successfully employed in many detections, but it doesn’t guarantee a 100 percent rate of success. Internal processes in the stars can also create similar wobbles.

Advertisement

In fact, a point of suspicion came from the data: The planet orbited the star at the same time the star rotated on its axis. A study in 2021 suggested it was a false positive, and another one the year after couldn’t conclude one way or the other. The new work agrees that the detection was indeed a false positive, and that what was believed to be the effect of the planet were just surface peculiarities of the star, which is also known as HD 26965.

The team saw the radial velocity signals seen in previous observations but also tracked the activity of the stars, and found that both detections have periods that are very close to each other.

“The extreme proximity of these two detections leads us to classify this RV detection conclusively as activity,” the authors wrote in the paper. “We therefore classify this as a false positive signal.”

So it seems that this is goodbye to Vulcan. The work did not set out to disprove its existence, but it was actually part of a much wider study on how well we know the nearest stars and exoplanets to Earth. The research can be seen as foundational work for a future space telescope that would study nearby planets in the habitable zone: the Habitable Worlds Observatory.

Advertisement

Before such a telescope is even constructed, it is important to know what are the properties of the stars and planets that it might study. So, the team analyzed all the data available about 100 stars that have the potential to host planets we might be able to image with this future observatory. However, some of them turned out not to exist.

Planets named Vulcan have a tendency to not exist – astronomers had proposed the existence of another Vulcan inside the orbit of Mercury, but Einstein proved that it did not exist.

The paper is accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal and it is available on the ArXiV.   

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Soccer – Stunning strike earns point for Bolivia in World Cup qualifier
  2. Bumpy autumnal ride ahead for emerging market currencies: Reuters poll
  3. Venezuela will not reform oil law this year, socialist lawmaker says
  4. Italy’s PD leader Letta seen winning Siena parliamentary seat – early count

Source Link: Turns Out Star Trek's Planet Vulcan Doesn't Exist After All

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Gonorrhea Vaccines, New Antibiotics, And At-Home Testing: What’s The Latest In STI Research?
  • What NASA’s Galileo Spacecraft Saw As It Plunged Into Jupiter
  • Very Hungry “Plastivore” Caterpillars Get Fat From Eating Plastic
  • “Nobody Expected This”: Earth’s Rotation Will Speed Up Tomorrow, Bucking The Downward Trend
  • Chimps Are Sticking Grass In Their Ears And Rears As They Embrace “Pointless” Fad
  • Hui Te Rangiora: Old Māori Legend Suggests They May Have Discovered Antarctica 1,000 Years Before Europeans
  • “Potential Impact On Saturn”: Astronomers Appeal For Help As Video Appears To Show Object Hitting The Gas Giant
  • What Is Prosopometamorphopsia? The “Exceedingly Rare” Condition That Made A Patient See Faces As Dragons
  • Are We In An Enormous Void? It Could Explain What’s Wrong With Our Model Of The Universe
  • Woylies Boing Back Into Western Australia Thanks To Groundbreaking Wildlife Project
  • North America’s Oldest Pterosaur And Turtle Fossils Found In Arizona’s Petrified Forest
  • Proposed “Dark Dwarfs” Near The Galactic Center Could Reveal The Nature Of Dark Matter
  • Watch: 18-Kilometer-High Ash Cloud Looms Over Indonesia’s Mount Lewotobi Laki Laki After “Explosive” Eruption
  • “ShipGoo001”: Mystery Of Entirely New Lifeform Discovered Coating A Great Lakes Ship
  • Rare White Humpback Whale Calf Filmed By Drone Off Australia’s East Coast
  • Who Was Buried At Cave Of Salome: A Female Disciple, Jesus’ Midwife, Or A Princess?
  • “Hidden” Changes To US Health Data Swapping “Gender” For “Sex” Spark Fears For Public Trust
  • Easter Island Was Never As Isolated As We Thought – Study Puts That “Strange Argument” To Bed
  • If Birds Are Dinosaurs, Why Are None As Big As T. Rexes?
  • Psychologists Demonstrate Illusion That Could Be Screwing Up Our Perception Of Time
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version