Sorry, Trekkies: Scientists say Spock’s home planet does not exist

By Dean Murray via SWNS

Sorry, Mr. Spock, your home planet does not exist.

Scientists have revealed a planet thought to orbit the star 40 Eridani A – host to the Star Trek character's fictional home Vulcan – is really a kind of "astronomical illusion".

NASA says a new study reveals the phantom planet - scientific name HD 26965 b -was actually caused by "the pulses and jitters of the star itself".

A science team led by astronomer Abigail Burrows of Dartmouth College, previously of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has published a paper describing the result.

NASA says: "The possible detection of a planet orbiting a star that Star Trek made famous drew excitement and plenty of attention when it was announced in 2018.

"Only five years later, the planet appeared to be on shaky ground when other researchers questioned whether it was there at all.

"Now, precision measurements using a NASA-NSF instrument, installed a few years ago atop Kitt Peak in Arizona, seem to have returned the planet Vulcan even more definitively to the realm of science fiction."

By tracking subtle shifts in starlight, scientists can measure “wobbles” in the star itself, as the gravity of an orbiting planet tugs it one way, then another.

For very large planets, the radial velocity signal mostly leads to unambiguous planet detections. But not-so-large planets can be problematic.

Even the scientists who made the original, possible detection of planet HD 26965 b – almost immediately compared to the fictional Vulcan – cautioned that it could turn out to be stellar jitters masquerading as a planet.

They reported evidence of a “super-Earth” – larger 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 not yet available in 2018, confirms that caution about the possible discovery was justified.

The destruction of Vulcan had been anticipated in the fictional 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 employs an artificial black hole to blow Spock’s home world out of existence.

The paper "The death of Vulcan: NEID reveals the planet candidate orbiting HD 26965 is stellar activity", is published this month in The Astronomical Journal.