Star Trek heartbreak! Vulcan-like planet is merely a cosmic illusion created by its star, study reveals

It's sad news for all Star Trek fans as the real-life version of planet Vulcan, which is shown as Mr Spock's fictional home, might not be a planet at all but only an astronomical illusion, as per a new study.

As a scientific study conducted by Abigail Burrows of Dartmouth College, and previously of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and her team, Vulcan orbiting the star 40 Eridani A, is a kind of illusion caused by the pulses and jitters of the star itself.

The study was published in a paper titled, "The death of Vulcan: NEID reveals the planet candidate orbiting HD 26965 is stellar activity," inThe Astronomical Journal.

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The study conducted with the help of a NASA-NSF instrument, installed atop Kitt Peak in Arizona, seems to have reduced the planet Vulcan to just an illusion.

Vulcan: An exoplanet or mere illusion?

The possibility of a planet similar to what Star Trek projected, drew a lot of excitement and intrigue in 2018 when something similar to Vulcan was discovered. But five years later, the planet appears to be at the threshold of being pushed into the science fiction realm.

Only five years later, the planet appeared to be on shaky ground when other researchers questioned whether it was there at all.

Usually, the "radial velocity" method has been in vogue to discover a healthy share of exoplanets. This method also works for systems with planets that don't, from Earth's point of view, cross the faces of their stars, unlike the transit method.

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By tracking subtle shifts in starlight, scientists can measure "wobbles" in the star itself, as the gravity of an orbiting planet tugs it one way, then another. This is called a star's radial velocity signal that mostly leads to planet detections.

The instrument used in the study, known as NEID, is a recent addition to the complex of telescopes at Kitt Peak National Observatory.

NEID, like other radial velocity instruments, relies on the Doppler effect- shifts in the light spectrum of a star that reveal its wobbling motions. In this case, parsing out the supposed planet signal at various wavelengths of light, emitted from different levels of the star's outer shell, revealed significant differences between individual wavelength measurements and the total signal when they were all combined.

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This could mean only one thing- that the planet signal is the flickering of something on the star's surface that coincides with a 42-day rotation, combined with stellar surface features such as spots and "plages," which are bright, active regions. Both can alter a star's radial velocity signals.

Even the scientists who made the original, possible detection of planet HD 26965 b, immediately compared to the fictional Vulcan, cautioned that it could turn out to be messy stellar jitters masquerading as a planet.

(With inputs from agencies)