Judge Smails
10-29-2008, 02:57 PM
Astronomers may have spotted Mr. Spock's home planet (http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=astronomers-may-have-spotted-spocks-2008-10-28)
There really may be a planet Vulcan.
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope (http://www.sciam.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=2AA69390-B4C6-816D-75980C12FA2DB9C1) has detected two asteroid belts around Epsilon Eridani (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/multimedia/20081027a.html), the planetary system closest to ours and home to Star Trek's fictitious First Officer Spock, the space agency reported yesterday.
A planet near the inner asteroid belt (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=in-science-fiction-movies) was identified eight years ago. The newly spotted planet is in the vicinity of the outer belt.
Epsilon Eridani is around 10 light-years, or 62 trillion miles (98 trillion kilometers), away from Earth's solar system and, at a mere 850 million years old, is considered a younger, similar version of our own 4.5- billion-year-old system. Star Trek creators made it the home of Vulcan, and it's possible that there are as-yet-unseen Earth-like planets between the star system and its inner ring, astronomer Massimo Marengo of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics told McClatchy Newspapers (http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics/AP/story/744595.html).
There really may be a planet Vulcan.
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope (http://www.sciam.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=2AA69390-B4C6-816D-75980C12FA2DB9C1) has detected two asteroid belts around Epsilon Eridani (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/multimedia/20081027a.html), the planetary system closest to ours and home to Star Trek's fictitious First Officer Spock, the space agency reported yesterday.
A planet near the inner asteroid belt (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=in-science-fiction-movies) was identified eight years ago. The newly spotted planet is in the vicinity of the outer belt.
Epsilon Eridani is around 10 light-years, or 62 trillion miles (98 trillion kilometers), away from Earth's solar system and, at a mere 850 million years old, is considered a younger, similar version of our own 4.5- billion-year-old system. Star Trek creators made it the home of Vulcan, and it's possible that there are as-yet-unseen Earth-like planets between the star system and its inner ring, astronomer Massimo Marengo of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics told McClatchy Newspapers (http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics/AP/story/744595.html).