by An extrasolar planet compared to Spock’s Vulcan homeworld 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 our solar system) was proposed to orbit a star called 40 Eridani A or “Keid,” which is part of a triple star system located about 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 a stir thanks to its similarities to Spock’s fictional home planet.
A team of scientists led by Dartmouth College astronomer Abigail Burrows now thinks that the “wobble” of this planet’s parent star is not the result of an orbiting world pulling on it at all. Holes and colleagues using a NASA instrument called NEID located at the Kitt Peak National Observatory discovered that the origin of this swarm is actually Keid’s own “pulses and flickers”.
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The fictional version of Vulcan was first introduced during Gene Roddenberry’s original series run of Star Trek, mentioned in the 1965 pilot episode “The Cage.” In the 2009 Star Trek reboot directed by JJ Abrams, an enemy destroyed Kirk, Spock and the rest of the time-traveling Enterprise Vulcan crew.
By debunking the real-life Vulcan, officially HD 26965 b, this new research shows that life sometimes imitates art.
Sorry Keid, you’re on your own…
There are many ways to find exoplanets orbiting distant stars, but the two most successful techniques are the transit method and the radial velocity method. Both of these techniques estimate the effect of an orbiting planet on its star.
The transit method, used with great success by NASA’s Transiting Esoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), measures the small dips in light that a planet causes as it crosses the face of its parent star.
Although the transit method is by far the most fruitful of these two exoplanet detection methods, the radial velocity method is useful for seeing exoplanets that do not pass between the face of the star and our vantage point in the solar system.
The radial velocity method uses tiny shifts in a star’s light as an orbiting planet pulls on it. As a star is pulled away from Earth, the wavelength of the light it emits is stretched, causing it to shift to the “red end” of the electromagnetic spectrum, a phenomenon known as “redshift.” The opposite happens when the star is pulled towards Earth, the wavelengths of light are compressed, and the light becomes “blue shifted” towards the “blue end” of the electromagnetic spectrum.
This is similar to the Doppler effect, which affects sound waves on Earth. When an ambulance runs towards us, the sound waves from their tires are compressed, making them louder. When the ambulance moves away, the sound waves are further out, and the horn becomes lower.
The radial velocity method is better for detecting particularly massive planets, as these exert a greater gravitational pull on their stars and thus generate a more pronounced shift in starlight from that stellar body. However, it is less robust in detecting planets with lower masses than Jupiter, the most massive planet in the solar system.
When HD 26965 b was first discovered using the radial velocity method, its mass was estimated to be about 8 times that of Earth but less than that of Neptune, making it a “Super-Earth” planet ” it. The faux-Vulcan was suspected to orbit its parent star at about 22% of the distance between Earth and the sun, completing a year in about 42 Earth days.
But even the scientists who discovered this planet warned that it could be a false discovery due to Keid’s innate wisdom. By 2023, researchers strongly doubted the existence of this exoplanet. These new high-precision radial velocity measurements, which were not yet available in 2018, are the final nail in the coffin of the Vulcan-like HD 26965 b.
NEID brought the disappointing news to Star Trek fans, whose name rhymes with “fluid.” NEID is an instrument that uses radial velocity to measure the motion of nearby stars with great precision.
NEID separated the suspected planetary signal into wavelengths that reflect light emitted from different layers in Keid’s surface structure or photosphere. This allowed the team to detect significant differences in the individual wavelengths compared to the overall combined signal.
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It turns out that the signal suggested that HD 26965 b actually exists as a result of something flickering on Keid’s surface about every 42 Earth days. This effect could also be created when hot and cold plasma rises and falls through the Keid convective zone and interacts with surface features such as dark sunspot patches or bright active regions called “plates.”
While this discovery is not good news for Keid and his planetary prospects, or for Star Trek fans, it is a positive step for exoplanet-hunting scientists.
That is why NEID’s fine-tuned radial velocity measurements hold the promise that planetary signals can be more accurately separated and distinguished from the natural glow of stars in the future.
The team’s research has been published in The Astronomical Journal.
