Artist’s concept of a previously proposed possible planet, HD 26965 b – often compared to the fictional ‘Vulcan’ in the Star Trek universe. Credit: JPL-Caltech
New research refutes the existence of Vulcan, a planet thought to orbit 40 Eridani A, and attributes detected signals to the star’s surface activity.
A planet believed to orbit the star 40 Eridani A – host to Mr.’s fictional home planet. Spock, Vulcan, in the “Star Trek” universe – is actually a kind of astronomical illusion caused by the pulses and vibrations of the star itself. This is evident from a new study published in The astronomical magazine.
Initial excitement and subsequent doubts
The possible detection of a planet around a star that made Star Trek famous attracted excitement and a lot of attention when it was announced in 2018. Just five years later, the planet seemed to be on shaky ground as other researchers wondered if it was even there. . Now precision measurements can be made using a NASA– The NSF instrument, installed a few years ago atop Kitt Peak in Arizona, seems to have returned the planet Vulcan even more definitively to the realm of science fiction.
Detection methods for exoplanets
Two methods of detecting exoplanets – planets orbiting other stars – dominate all others in the ongoing search for strange new worlds. The transit method, which looks for the small dip in starlight when a planet crosses the side of its star, is responsible for the vast majority of detections. But the ‘radial velocity’ method has also produced a healthy share exoplanet discoveries. This method is especially important for systems with planets that, from Earth’s point of view, do not cross the planes of their stars. By tracking subtle shifts in starlight, scientists can measure “wobbles” in the star itself, as the gravity of an orbiting planet pulls it one way, then another. For very large planets, the radial velocity signal usually leads to unambiguous planet detections. But not so large planets can be problematic.
Questioning Vulcan’s existence
Even the scientists who made the original possible detection of planet HD 26965 b – almost immediately compared to the fictional Vulcan – warned that it could be messy stellar jitters masquerading as a planet. They reported evidence of a ‘super-Earth’ – bigger than Earth, smaller than Neptune – in a 42-day orbit around a Sun-like star about 16 light-years away. The new analysis, using high-precision radial velocity measurements that were not available in 2018, confirms that caution regarding the possible discovery was warranted.
NEID instrument clarifies doubts
The bad news for Star Trek fans comes from an instrument known as NEID, a recent addition to the Kitt Peak National Observatory’s complex of telescopes. NEID, like other radial velocity instruments, relies on the “Doppler” effect: shifts in a star’s light spectrum that reveal its wobbling motions. In this case, parsing the planet’s hypothesized signal into different wavelengths of light, emitted from different levels of the star’s outer shell, or photosphere, revealed significant differences between individual wavelength measurements – their Doppler shifts – and the overall signal when they were all combined. . That means the planet’s signal is most likely actually the flickering of something on the star’s surface that coincides with a 42-day rotation — perhaps the swirling of hotter and cooler layers beneath the star’s surface, called convection , combined with features of the surface of stars. such as spots and ‘plages’, which are bright, active areas. Both can change a star’s radial velocity signals.
Potential for future discoveries
Although the new find, at least for now, deprives star 40 Eridani A of its possible planet Vulcan, the news isn’t all bad. The demonstration of such finely tuned radial velocity measurements holds the promise of making sharper observational distinctions between actual planets and the vibrations and vibrations on surfaces of distant stars.
Even Vulcan’s destruction is foreseen in the Star Trek universe. Vulcan was first identified as Spock’s home planet in the original 1960s television series. But in the 2009 film “Star Trek,” a Romulan villain named Nero uses an artificial one black hole to blow up Spock’s homeworld.
A scientific team led by astronomer Abigail Burrows of Dartmouth College, and formerly of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, published a paper describing the new result: “The Death of Vulcan: NEID Reveals That Candidate Planet Orbiting HD 26965 is rotating, stellar activity is”, in The astronomical magazine in May 2024 (Note: HD 26965 is an alternate designation for the star, 40 Eridani A.)
Reference: “The Death of Vulcan: NEID Reveals Planet Candidate Orbiting HD 26965 is a Great Activity*” by Abigail Burrows, Samuel Halverson, Jared C. Siegel, Christian Gilbertson, Jacob Luhn, Jennifer Burt, Chad F . Bender, Arpita Roy, Ryan C. Terrien, Selma Vangstein, Suvrath Mahadevan, Jason T. Wright, Paul Robertson, Eric B. Ford, Gumundur Stefánsson, Joe P. Ninan, Cullen H. Blake, Michael W. McElwain, Christian Schwab and Jinglin Zhao, April 26, 2024, The astronomical magazine.
DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/ad34d5