Space scientists have discovered that the home planet of Star Trek’s Mr Spock may really exist – or at least something very like it. They used a powerful telescope to find evidence for rocky worlds around the very star which his home world Vulcan supposedly orbits in the hit TV and movie series.
The search for Spock got easier thanks to results from a heat-seeking telescope called Spitzer which observes from deep space.
It zoomed in on the ninth closest star to Earth, Epsilon Eridani, which was already known to be surrounded by a disk of dust.
New observations show that the star, in the constellation of Eridanus, the River, is surrounded by two bands of millions of rocky and metal fragments just like the asteroid belt that lies beyond Mars in our own solar system.
Asteroids are the left-over building blocks of planets. And with Spock-like logic, the NASA experts deduce that for them to be there, there must be rocky planets like Earth too.
It boosts the chance that this new solar system could be inhabited – though whether the aliens have pointy ears like Spock or not is impossible to say and they would have had little time to evolve in any case.
Spitzer also detected three giant gas worlds like Jupiter and confirmed a ring of icy comets similar to the Kuiper Belt that is believed to border our solar system.
Astronomers are intrigued because Epsilon Eridani’s solar system appears to resemble the Sun’s own family of planets, although the star is considerably younger.
Nasa expert Marc Kuchner told USA Today: “I wouldn’t be surprised if there are seven or eight planets orbiting Epsilon Eridani. One of these could well be habitable.”
The star is a younger and slightly cooler version of the sun, and lies just over ten light-years from the Earth.
It means if we tried to beam a message to Spock, it would take over ten years to get to the real Vulcan. And you’d need the warp speed of the Enterprise to fly there in kess than several thousand years.
Spitzer discovered that one of the asteroid belts lies at around the same position as that in our solar system. The second, denser belt lies further out at around the distance of Uranus from the sun. The shape and pattern of the belts is thought to be shaped by the gravitational pull of Epsilon Eridani’s planets.
Hundreds of extrasolar planets are now known, including one that was apparently photographed. some are thought to be rocky like the Earth. But this is the first time that an asteroid belt and a planet beyond our solar system have been found in a similar arrangement as our asteroid belt and Jupiter.
NASA astronomer Dana Backman, who led the discovery team, said yesterday: “This system probably looks a lot like ours did when life first took root on Earth. The main difference we know of so far is that it has an additional ring of leftover planet-construction material.”
Co-discoverer Karl Stapelfeldt, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California, said: “Because the system is so close to us, Spitzer can really pick out details in the dust, giving us a good look at the system’s architecture.”
Picture: An artist’s impression of the new solar system. (NASA/JPL-Caltech).