Planet or Eye?

Southern California (Nov 18, 2008)

Back from Pasadena, PA, where I spent a week at a meeting on stellar disks. You may not be aware of that, but stars often have disks around. These disks are instrumental for their formation, and for the formation of their planetary systems (that’s why all planets typically have coplanar orbits: they forms from the same disk). As stars age they produce a new disk with the debris of collisions between asteroids and dust wasted around by comets. Even the Sun has such a disk, responsible for the phenomenon of the zodiacal light.

The last post was about one if such disks, that we found around a nearby star called epsilon Eridani (just 10 light years away), made by two asteroid belts, and an icy “ring” of comet-like bodies. We presented the results at the conference in Pasadena. The press release went well, and it was fun to find web sites and newspapers all over the world (from Iran to Japan) reporting the news (even claiming in some cases that what we found was Vulcan, the actual planet of Star Trek Mr. Spock).

The image above, in any case, is not of the planet of Spock (which is actually circling the star 40 Eridani). It is rather a “mini-world” version of a photo I took a while ago, of a surfer on a Southern California beach.