Saturday 22 September 2018

minshara class

Subject to confirmation when the patch of sky occupied by the star system undergoes detailed inspection by the TESS programme later in November, exoplanet hunting astronomers believe that they have found a rocky, terrestrial world (M-Class, spelled out from the Vulcan term above, in Star Trek parlance but not a scientific designation) approximately seventeen light years away from Earth orbiting a triennial star called 40 Eridani (in the Southern constellation Eridanus—a river in Hades that is thought to correspond with the Po or the Rhône) or properly Keid (from the Arabic qayd for eggshells) that matches the canonical location of the Vulcan home world.
There’s quite some range of possibilities for the planet and surely reality will prove more fantastic than fiction but it is within reason to believe that 40 Eridani A ฮฒ (there was already one other planet found there before this suspected Super Earth) might have similar conditions to those imaged for Vulcan, arid and higher gravity. Long before Star Trek, Vulcan was the designation for the planet that astronomy needed to be subaltern of Mercury to explain its anomalous orbit, until Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity dispensed with that hypothetical world.