A planet beyond the solar system that has been compared to Spock’s homeworld Vulcan in the Star Trek franchise may have been nothing more than an illusion caused by a jittery star.
The extrasolar planet or “exoplanet” (a term for a planet outside of our solar system) was proposed to orbit a star called 40 Eridani A or “Keid,” which is part of a triple star system located around 16.3 light-years from Earth. In Star Trek, this star is also home to the planet Vulcan. First announced in 2018, the planet caused quite a stir thanks to its similarities with Spock’s fictional home planet.
A team of scientists led by astronomer Abigail Burrows of Dartmouth College now thinks that the “wobble” of this planet’s parent star isn’t the result of an orbiting world tugging on it at all. Burrows and colleagues discovered using a NASA instrument called NEID located at Kitt Peak National Observatory that the origin of this wobble is actually “pulses and jitters” of Keid itself.
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