Accessibility links

Breaking News

New Observation of Nearby Star System Confirms Similarity to Ours


Artist's illustration of the Epsilon Eridani system showing Epsilon Eridani b. In the right foreground, a Jupiter-mass planet is shown orbiting its parent star at the outside edge of an asteroid belt.
Artist's illustration of the Epsilon Eridani system showing Epsilon Eridani b. In the right foreground, a Jupiter-mass planet is shown orbiting its parent star at the outside edge of an asteroid belt.

A relatively nearby planetary system is structured remarkably like what ours probably looked like when it was young, the U.S. space agency NASA confirms.

The system around the star Epsilon Eridani, or eps Eri, is just 10.5 light-years away and astronomers say it provides an excellent example of how planets form around stars in systems like ours.

Previous studies of the system using the Spitzer Space Telescope led to two theories about how the system formed. One suggested a wide debris disk made up of gas, dust and small rocky and icy bodies. Another suggested several thin debris disks similar to our system, which has an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and the Kuiper Belt of mostly icy objects beyond the dwarf planet Pluto.

Illustration based on Spitzer observations of the inner and outer parts of the Epsilon Eridani system compared with the corresponding components of our solar system.
Illustration based on Spitzer observations of the inner and outer parts of the Epsilon Eridani system compared with the corresponding components of our solar system.

Using the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, astronomers found eps Eri has two narrow bands like our system. Furthermore, they detected a Jupiter-sized planet roughly the same distance from its star as Jupiter is from the sun.

“It really is impressive how eps Eri, a much younger version of our solar system, is put together like ours,” said Kate Su of the University of Arizona who led the study.

SOFIA, which is a larger telescope than Spitzer, is mounted on a Boeing 747. It previously found oxygen in Mars’ atmosphere, offered close-up looks at Jupiter and has documented the formation of new stars.

If the name eps Eri sounds familiar, you may have already heard of it as the setting for the science fiction television series Babylon 5.

The description of eps Eri was published in the Astronomical Journal on April 25, 2017.

  • 16x9 Image

    VOA News

    The Voice of America provides news and information in more than 40 languages to an estimated weekly audience of over 326 million people. Stories with the VOA News byline are the work of multiple VOA journalists and may contain information from wire service reports.

XS
SM
MD
LG