Fiction becoming reality? Scientists think 'super-Earth' planned in famous series

Scientists have just found an extremely peculiar "super-Earth", located a short distance from our planet and resembled by its image and position with the well-known planet Vulcan, homeland of the character Spock of the series Star Trek.

Gregory Henry, one of the authors of the research published in the journal MNRAS and astronomer at the University of Tennessee in Nashville, says:

"Star Trek fans are well aware of this stellar system - it is exactly here, according to several maps and the creator of the series, Gene Roddenberry, that the planet Vulcan must be located, both in the series and in reality, circulate around of the main star of this triple system. "

Over the last few years, the researchers note, the Kepler spacecraft and a series of ground-based observatories have discovered thousands of planets outside the Solar System. Most of them have been found to be "hot Jupiters", large gaseous giants, or "super-Earths," which are rocky planets whose mass is 1.8-3 times that of Earth.

However, scientists have been able to detect dozens of potentially habitable planets, many of which closely resemble different celestial bodies from books, films, and science fiction series. For example, scientists today know about a dozen analogues of Tatooine from the movie Star Wars, that is, planets that circle around several stars at the same time.

Now, Henry and his colleagues have also found Mr. Spock's potential homeland in analyzing the data collected under the Dharma Planet Survey, which monitors stars near Earth.

Already for several years the members of this project have been trying to find traces of exoplanets. It was only now that they managed to discover the first planet by observing 40 Eridani, one of the triple star systems closest to the Sun and Earth. This stellar "family" consists of a star analogous to the Sun and two dwarfs, one white and one red, orbiting around the larger celestial body.

Three years ago, scientists noticed peculiar changes in the spectrum of this star that were not related to its gravitational interaction with the dwarfs. This made them think that near the "cousin of the sun" could be hiding a planet.

The scientists' hypotheses turned out to be true, as new observations showed a planet 8 times heavier than the Earth circling the 40 Eridani A.

According to Henry and his colleagues, temperatures on this planet must be quite high but fit for life, which makes it similar to Vulcan - Spock's mythical homeland located in the same star system. In addition, researchers believe that the real "Vulcan" has a high probability of harboring alien life on its surface, because its star is very much like the Sun in many ways.