| Epsilon Eridani | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Stellar characteristics | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Stellar mass | 0.85 solar masses | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Stellar luminosity | 0.34 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Age | 5.839 billion years (19.161 billion left on main sequence) Habitable ecosphere radius |
0.583 AU | | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Back in August of 2000, the CNN Web carried an article from Reuters about the discovery of a planet orbiting the star Epsilon Eridani. While doing their research on the story they apparently searched the web for references to Ε Eridani, and much to my surprise found a web page that I had created with my StarGen program. This was back before StarGen had been released and as there were no links to the page anywhere on the net (I had mailed the URL to a couple of friends so they could review the results) I was quite surprised to learn that any search engines knew about it.
Sadly, the CNN editor/researcher was rushed or a little short on comprehension and didn't notice that while the scientists had found only one planet, but hoped there might be more, my system had 14 (more recent versions of StarGen create on 11), so he listed it right along with the SolStation.com Ε Eridani page and other scientific links of interest.
And soon I was getting both fan mail and hate mail. A few people were eager to get their hands on StarGen, which wasn't yet ready for public consumption, and a fellow from a well respected space advocacy organization wrote me a letter scolding me for "contributing to the misunderstanding and misinformation surrounding the field of extra-solar planets." I guess some people are weak on the concept of science fiction.
StarGen-Created Pages Have Moved
Recently, in order to broaden the number of operating systems that could cope with the files StarGen creates, I changed the way that it names files. This means that EPS-Eri-38.html and not Epsilon-Eridani-38.html is now the name of the file created for Ε Eridani. That means I can put this longer explanation at the place linked to by CNN, rather than just sticking in the small yellow box above. The current version of StarGen's Ε Eridani #38 (meaning that 38 was used to seed the random number generator can be found here.Links to Real Science on Epsilon Eridani
If you'd like to know more about the real Ε Eridani, check out the following:- The Sol Company's SolStation
- Ε Eridani page
- ExoPlanets.org
- Lick Observatory Data
- Harvard's Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia
- Ε Eridani page
- Joint Astronomy Centre
- 1998 discovery of a dust ring Ε Eridani
- Space Daily
- 2002 discovery of Ε Eridani C