A few year ago , stargazer excitedly sharedthe newsthat a nominee exoplanet was spotted around star 40 Eridani A , which has a peculiar significance for fans ofStar Trek . It ’s the arrangement that hosts Vulcan , the world where Spock , T’Pol , and countless other characters come from – but it seems that the planet will have to stay a piece of work of fiction .
The existence of 40 Eridani b – Vulcan – has been in question for a while . Its cosmos was claimed base on a technique known as radial velocity . As a satellite orbit astar , its solemnity tugboat at it , creating a wobble in its ignitor . This has been successfully employ in many detective work , but it does n’t guarantee a 100 pct pace of succeeder . home processes in the stars can also make standardised wobbles .
In fact , a point of suspiciousness get along from the data : The major planet orbited the lead at the same time the star rotated on its axis . Astudy in 2021suggested it was a sour positive , andanother one the class aftercouldn’t conclude one way or the other . The unexampled oeuvre agrees that the detecting was indeed a false positivistic , and that what was believe to be the force of the planet were just airfoil peculiarities of the star , which is also have a go at it as HD 26965 .
The team escort the radial speed signals seen in premature notice but also tracked the bodily function of the superstar , and found that both detections have period that are very close to each other .
“ The extreme proximity of these two detections leads us to relegate this RV espial once and for all as body process , ” the source wrote inthe paper . “ We therefore classify this as a false positive sign . ”
So it seems that this is goodbye to Vulcan . The workplace did not set out to confute its existence , but it was really part of a much broad study on how well we know the nearest stars and exoplanets to Earth . The enquiry can be learn as foundational work for a future space scope that would take nearby planets in the inhabitable zone : the Habitable Worlds Observatory .
Before such a telescope is even constructed , it is important to know what are the properties of the stars and planet that it might canvass . So , the squad analyzed all the data available about 100 stars that have the potential to host major planet we might be capable to see with this future lookout station . However , some of them turned out not to exist .
satellite describe Vulcan have a tendency to not exist – astronomers had proposedthe being of another Vulcaninside the scope of Mercury , but Einstein prove that it did not exist .
The newspaper is accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal and it is available on theArXiV.
