There are countless suns and countless earths all rotating around their suns in exactly the

same way as the seven planets of our system. We see only the suns because they are the
largest bodies and are luminous, but their planets remain invisible to us because
they are smaller and non-luminous. The countless worlds in the universe are
no worse and no less inhabited than our Earth.
Giordano Bruno (1584), De linfinito universo e mondi

The Race to

I l l u s t r at i o n b y L y n e t t e C o o k

A hypothetical view from the Epsilon Eridani planetary

system. If a planet does orbit the nearby star, its likely to
be the first extrasolar planet ever detected directly.

34

June 2001 Sky & Telescope

2001 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Epsilon Eridani

BY GO VER T SCHILLING

It was the early morning

of April 8, 1960.
The 26-meter radio dish of the National
Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank,
West Virginia, was tracking Tau Ceti, a yellow
dwarf star 11.9 light-years away in the constellation Cetus, the Whale. In the control room, a
small group of radio astronomers and students
sat around a chart recorder looking for intelligent signals from space. Unknown to the rest of
the world, this was humanitys first serious effort to eavesdrop on alien civilizations.

For 29-year-old Frank Drake, team leader of Project Ozma (named after the princess in L. Frank
Baums Ozma of Oz), this was a dream come true.
Ever since his parents took him to the Adler Planetarium in Chicago in the late 1930s, Drake was convinced of the existence of extraterrestrial life. Finally,
he got the chance to look.
Drake and his colleagues followed Tau Ceti until it
set in the west. Then we aimed the telescope toward
our second target, Epsilon Eridani, he writes in Is
Anyone Out There?, a book coauthored by Dava Sobel.
We set up the recorders again and readied ourselves
for the long wait. But scarcely five minutes passed before the whole system erupted. WHAM! A burst of
noise shot out of the loudspeaker, the chart recorder
started banging off the scale, and we were all jumping
at once, wild with excitement.

2001 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Left: Frank Drakes Project Ozma, the first-ever

search for a signal from another world, used
the 26-meter radio telescope in Green Bank,
West Virginia. Courtesy Ron Monk, NRAO.
Above: Giordano Bruno, a Dominican monk
and contemporary of Galileo, was burned at
the stake on February 16, 1600, in part for expounding his belief in an infinite universe
containing an infinite number of inhabited
worlds. This statue in Romes Campo di Fiori
marks the spot of his execution. Photograph
by Imelda Joson.

As it turned out, the strong, pulsed signal had come from a

passing plane. There is no radio-broadcasting civilization at
Epsilon Eridani. Or if there is, it hasnt been detected yet.
Knowing so little about the universe, for all we knew just
about every star could be broadcasting messages, notes Drake.
So the false alarm surprised us, but [a true alien broadcast]
did not seem totally impossible and ridiculous at the time.
Back then, astronomers thought aliens might be easy to find,
much easier than discovering planets outside our solar system.
We had no idea how long it would take to develop adequate
telescopes, says Drake. But the first extrasolar planets were discovered much earlier than most expected, starting in the 1990s.
And now, 40 years after the start of Project Ozma, astronomers
at the University of Texas in Austin claim to have found evidence
for the existence of a planet orbiting the star Epsilon Eridani.
Since Epsilon Eridani is only 10.5 light-years away, this companion would be the closest planet outside our solar system detected so far. The discovery just encouraged my thought that if
you look with enough sensitivity at any solar-type star, you will
frequently discover planets, says Drake. And though nobody
expects the Epsilon Eridani planet to be inhabited by an alien
civilization, its nearness raises an exciting question: When will
we have our first actual picture of an extrasolar planet?
36

June 2001 Sky & Telescope

Seeing Planets
No one has ever seen a planet of another star, though astronomers have dreamed about it since at least the 16th century, when Italian monk and philosopher Giordano Bruno propagated his idea of a multitude of worlds. A planets tiny, feeble
dot of light might be a hundred million times fainter than the
star it orbits, dimmer by 20 magnitudes. No existing telescope
can cope with such an extreme brightness contrast between
two objects only an arcsecond apart or less.
Instead, astronomers rely on indirect methods to detect other
worlds. An orbiting planets gravity will tug a star around in a
tiny, regular wobble a reflex orbit that causes minute
variations in the stars (line-of-sight) radial velocity. Due to the
Doppler effect, these shift the wavelength of the stars spectral
lines slightly. The wavelength shifts are incredibly small, measured in parts per hundred million, but they can now be tracked
using sensitive, specially designed spectroscopes.
Since 1995, when the Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and
Didier Queloz (Geneva Observatory) announced the first extrasolar planet around a Sun-like star (51 Pegasi), the radial-velocity technique has revealed more than 50 other planets. More
than half of these have been discovered by the prolific team led
by Geoffrey Marcy (University of California, Berkeley) and R.

2001 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Out there in the winter sky, 100 trillion kilometers away, a giant planet orbiting
Epsilon Eridani may be awaiting our view. But how can we find out if it really exists?
Paul Butler (Carnegie Institution of Washington). Most are
hot Jupiters massive planets circling very close to their
stars. The reason so many discoveries fit this description is
surely a selection effect; hot Jupiters produce the largest radialvelocity variations, and they complete their orbits in days and
months instead of years and decades. A few percent of all Sunlike stars seem to have such a companion.
Another technique to discover exoplanets is to measure the
actual reflex motion of a star in the plane of the sky, not along
the line of sight. Unfortunately, this motion is largest for a
massive planet orbiting far from the star. So you would need to
track the star for many years before the planet completes
enough of an orbit to reveal itself unambiguously. Moreover,
the farther the star is from us, the harder this wobble is to detect. No extrasolar planet has been clearly found this way. Nevertheless, future astrometric space missions will probably turn
them up by the thousands. In 2004 and 2006 respectively,
NASA will launch FAME (Full-sky Astrometric Mapping Explorer) and SIM (the Space Interferometry Mission). Recently,
the European Space Agency selected GAIA (Global Astrometric
Interferometer for Astrophysics) as a cornerstone mission, to
be launched in 2009. All three will far surpass the Hipparcos
astrometry mission of the 1990s for both precision and sheer
number of star positions measured.
Finally, a planet can be detected by a very different method
when we happen to see its orbit edge on. During every revolution it will transit the face of its parent star, causing a minute
drop in the stars brightness as seen from the Earth. The planetary
companion of the star HD 209458 was observed in this way in late
1999, leading to the first determination of an extrasolar planets diameter and density (January issue, page 29). NASA is considering
the 2006 launch of a satellite named Kepler, which would monitor
tens of thousands of stars simultaneously looking for transits of extrasolar planets. Its designers plan to detect planets down to the
size of Earth and hope to discover them by the hundreds.
Although observing the shadow of a planet comes close,
none of these techniques yields an actual, direct image of an
alien world. The race is on to be the first to take a photograph
showing a faint speck of light orbiting another star, to measure
its dimensions, and perhaps, to study the composition of its atmosphere or surface.

ly, with a rotation period of 11 days compared to the Suns 27day period. This fast rotation gives Epsilon a strong magnetic
field, hence large starspots and a variable spectrum.
Astronomers have long wondered whether this tantalizingly
nearby star has planets. In 1974 Peter van de Kamp claimed to
have found a 25-year wobble in the stars position on the sky,
leading him to announce a planet having six Jupiter masses, a
finding that was later proved spurious (S&T: July 1974, page 22).
Radial-velocity observations carried out in the 1980s by Canadian astronomers Bruce Campbell and Gordon Walker also hinted
at this possibility. However, their spectroscope was less sensitive
than current instruments, and the data were not fully convincing. A stronger piece of evidence came unexpectedly. During its
one-year mission in 1983 the Infrared Astronomical Satellite
(IRAS) discovered a handful of nearby stars that emit more infrared radiation than expected. Apparently they are surrounded
by dust that is warmed by starlight and radiates at longer, infrared wavelengths. Since the stars themselves dont show any
signs of dust absorption, astronomers concluded that the dust
couldnt be in a spherical shell but instead must be in a flattened
disk. One of these infrared-excess stars was Epsilon Eridani.
Could a disk of dust around this relatively young star be the
remnant of a planetary systems formation? Why not? According
to some theorists, its almost impossible to avoid forming planets
when you start with a circumstellar disk of gas and dust. Evidence
of comets is seen in the spectrum of Beta Pictoris (another IRAS
infrared-excess star), and it is generally believed that icy comets
and rocky planetesimals are the basic building blocks of planets.
Perhaps the planetary system of Epsilon Eridani is already fully
developed. The dust disk could represent leftover debris compara-

Epsilon Eridani
Shining demurely at magnitude 3.7 in the winter constellation
Eridanus, the River, Epsilon Eridani is the third-closest nakedeye star. It is somewhat smaller, cooler, and fainter than our
star with 70 percent of the Suns diameter, a surface temperature of 5,200 Kelvin (the Sun is 5,800 K), and 30 percent of
the Suns luminosity. Its spectral type is K2. With an age of less
than a billion years, Epsilon Eridani is also younger than the
Sun. Its relative youth is betrayed by the fact that it spins rapidMichel Mayor and Didier Queloz (Geneva Observatory) announced
the first-ever indirect detection of an extrasolar planet around a Sunlike star, 51 Pegasi, in 1995. The team used the radial-velocity technique to find this body, a mechanism that has helped astronomers
uncover more than 50 extrasolar planets. Artwork by Lynette Cook.

2001 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Sky & Telescope June 2001

37

Extrasolar planets orbit their parents stars in paths tilted at various angles to our line of sight. The star HD 209458 in Pegasus is a rare case in
which a planet orbits in a plane oriented almost exactly edge on to Earth. AStronomers detected the planet indirectly when they saw a minute
drop in the stars brightness as the orbiting companion crossed in front of it. The star dims by 1.6 percent for several hours every 312 days as the
Jupiter-like planet transits its face. Artwork by Lynette Cook.

ble to our solar systems Kuiper Belt beyond the orbit of Neptune.
A tantalizing confirmation of this scenario came in early
1998, when Jane Greaves (Joint Astronomy Centre, Hawaii) observed Epsilon Eridani with the SCUBA (Submillimeter Common User Bolometer Array) camera mounted on the 15-meter
James Clerk Maxwell Submillimeter Telescope atop Mauna
Kea, Hawaii. SCUBA imaged the dust disk of Epsilon Eridani
directly in unprecedented detail. It is a doughnut-shaped structure with a central cavity almost as large as our solar system.
Maybe the inner part of the disk has been swept clean by fullfledged planets formed from the accreting dust. According to
Greaves, the outer ring looks very much the way SCUBA would
see our Kuiper Belt from Epsilon Eridanis distance.
Still more exciting is a bright blob in the ring an asymmetric feature of the sort also detected in submillimeter images
of the dust disks of Vega, Fomalhaut, and
Beta Pictoris. The blobs might be concentrations of dust trapped around a larger
body or, more likely, might result from
gravitational perturbations by a massive
planet that orbits just inside the ring

38

June 2001 Sky & Telescope

A New World at Last

A planet with an orbital radius of 30 a.u. (the distance between
Neptune and the Sun) would be too distant to be found by current techniques. The stars radial-velocity variation and its propermotion wobble on the sky would both be much too small and
slow. But worlds closer to Epsilon might be detectable. In fact,
Marcy and his colleagues have observed the star for the past 13
years, and in a 1999 paper in the Astrophysical Journal, Andrew
Cumming (University of California, Santa Barbara), Marcy, and
Butler reported signs of a 6.9-year periodicity in their Doppler

Jup
Nep
JOINT ASTRONOMY CENTRE

The cold dust disk around Epsilon Eridani is

seen here in this 850-micron image taken
with the SCUBA instrument on the James
Clerk Maxwell Submillimeter Telescope atop
Mauna Kea, Hawaii (left). Its disk is analogous
to our Kuiper Belt (right), implying that Epsilon Eridanis planetary system could be
quite similar to our solar system.

some 30 astronomical units (a.u.) from the star. According to

theorist Jack Lissauer (NASA/Ames Research Center), the blob
in the dust ring of Epsilon Eridani is good evidence, but not
convincing proof of such a planet.

2001 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Ur
Sat

Understanding radial-velocity variations and

Doppler shifts. As an unseen planet orbits a
star, its velocity relative to Earth grows and
recedes. This induces periodic Doppler shifts
in the stars spectral lines as seen from Earth.
Monitoring these minute radial-velocity shifts
enables astronomers to determine the stars
reflex motion and to estimate the masses and
distances of the unseen companions.

Tracking Spectral Shifts

Planet

Blueshifted spectrum
System
center
of mass

Star

Spectroscope

Blueshifted light
To Earth

Wavelengths
at which light
is absorbed
by atoms, ions,
or molecules

measurements in very rough agreement with the early observations of

Redshifted light
Star
Campbell and Walker.
Unfortunately, the data were still not
very convincing, mainly due to the stars
System
Spectroscope
magnetic variability, which causes the
center
of mass
shapes of the spectral lines and their
Doppler shifts to vary. So Marcy and his
Redshifted spectrum
colleagues didnt list Epsilon Eridani as a
Planet
solid candidate for a companion.
But on August 7, 2000, William Cochran and Artie Hatzes (McDonald Observatory) were less reserved. At the 24th General Assembly of the known as m sin i. This will cause a planets mass to be underInternational Astronomical Union (IAU) in Manchester, Eng- estimated by a median of only 15 percent, but in rare cases, the
land, they announced their detection of a Jupiter-mass planet correction will be much larger. If Epsilon Eridanis planet orin a 6.9-year orbit based on their own observations as well as bits in the same plane as the dust ring observed by SCUBA
(tilted 30), its mass is around 1.6 Jupiters, says Cochran.
the data from Marcys team.
How can Cochran and Hatzes be so sure they arent fooled
by the stars spectroscopic variability? Could there be some Confirmation
stellar magnetic cycle with a period of 6.9 years? Cochran says So out there in the winter sky, 100 trillion kilometers away, a
thats very unlikely. Team member Sallie Baliunas (Harvard- giant planet orbiting Epsilon Eridani may be awaiting our view.
Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) has published detailed But how can we find out if it really exists?
Transits would require an extremely precise edge-on orientachromospheric measurements of Epsilon Eridani. In particular,
she looked at the relative strength of the prominent H and K tion of the orbit to our line of sight and are thus almost certainlines of singly ionized calcium, a standard measure of stellar ly out of the question. The larger a planets orbit, the smaller the
probability of seeing transits. A second possible confirmation
surface activity. No periodicity around 6.9 years was found.
Nevertheless, many astronomers remain skeptical about the technique would be to look for reflected starlight blended with
reality of Epsilon Eridanis planet. Marcy and his colleagues de- the spectrum of Epsilon Eridani itself. The trace of reflected
cline to comment on the putative discovery by Cochran and light would be Doppler-shifted by a substantial amount due to
Hatzes. On their Web site (www.exoplanets.org), they politely the planets orbital motion. This technique was pioneered by
state that the interpretation of a planet remains controversial. Andrew Collier Cameron (University of St. Andrews, Scotland).
And pioneering planet hunter Michel Mayor says, Of all the In 1999 Cameron thought he saw such an effect in the spectrum
currently known extrasolar planets, the Epsilon Eridani planet of Tau Botis a star with a hot Jupiter but he later retracted the claim (S&T: December 2000, page 34).
is the least convincing.
Unfortunately, this technique cant work for a planet far from
Orbiting at an average distance of 500 million kilometers
from its star, Epsilon Eridanis planet would be more like Jupi- its star. The planet wouldnt be lit brightly enough, and its orter than most discoveries so far. However, its orbit is highly ec- bital velocity would be too small to create a big enough Doppler
centric, taking it from 1.3 to 5.3 a.u. from the star. If the planet shift. Even for hot Jupiters, the reflection-spectrum technique
circled our Sun, it would move from just inside the orbit of remains at the limit of whats instrumentally possible.
Nevertheless, both Camerons team and a team at the EuroMars to just outside the orbit of Jupiter.
The amplitude of the radial-velocity variations combined pean Southern Observatory (ESO) are pursuing it on other
with the known mass of the star gives a lower limit to the plan- stars. Observations at the Very Large Telescope have been carets mass: 0.8 Jupiter. The true mass is probably somewhat ried out recently on HD 75289, says ESOs Gnther Wiedehigher, but not much; it depends on the unknown inclination mann. Very high-quality data have been obtained and are
of the orbit to our line of sight. What astronomers actually presently in the reduction process. Additional observations will
measure by the radial-velocity method is not a planets mass be carried out in 2001. But observing the reflection spectrum
but the mass times the sine of the orbits inclination, a quantity of the Epsilon Eridani planet is out of the question.

The first independent confirmation of the planets existence will probably come
from astrometry. Unless, of course, someone takes a direct picture first.
2001 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Sky & Telescope June 2001

39

Nulling Interferometry
Light beams in phase,
on axis

Beams out of phase,

on axis
No delay
Optical path
delay

Direct image
of star

Final image

Nulling interferometry explained. If astronomers combine the light of two telescopes sitting side by side, the resulting image is sharper. However, if the incoming light waves are offset properly, the two signals will cancel each other out when combined. By nulling out the central
image, in this case a bright star masking its planet, peripheral features in the image (the hidden planet) come into view.

The most promising method for confirming the planets existence is the oldest astrometry. According to Cochran, the
stars reflex displacement on the sky due to the orbiting planet
should be 2 milliarcseconds. This is probably within reach of
current space-based missions like the Hubble Space Telescope,
he says. Using adaptive optics, it might even be within reach of
ground-based astrometric programs. Of course, since the planets orbital period is supposedly 6.9 years, some patience is required. For instance, the relatively sparse data from Hipparcos
havent been much help, says Cochran. Also, Epsilon Eridani is
bright enough to make precise astrometric measurements difficult. Nevertheless, the first independent confirmation of the
planets existence will probably come from astrometry.
Unless, of course, someone takes a direct picture first.

40

Signal

SOURCE: PHILIP HINZ

Star Removal
So how difficult would it be to see the planet of Epsilon Eridani
directly? After all, its a large gas giant. Its average distance of
3.3 a.u. from its star amounts to a full arcsecond as seen from
Earth. That would be easy to resolve if the star werent so
bright and the planet werent so faint. However, 10.5 light-years
is 166,000 times the distance of Jupiter at opposition. If Epsilon
Eridanis planet is a twin of Jupiter, it would be 166,000

1"

Constructive
interference

June 2001 Sky & Telescope

Destructive
interference

166,000 = 27.5 billion times fainter somewhere between

24th and 25th magnitude. At an arcsecond separation from a
3.7-magnitude star, thats a tough challenge!
Current adaptive optics systems seem unlikely to be up to
the task, comments Neville Woolf (University of Arizona).
John Trauger (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) agrees. There is a
fundamental limitation in adaptive correction of ground-based
telescopes, he says, that will make direct detection from the
ground unlikely for any except perhaps the brightest few nearby stars. In space, the current situation isnt much better: the
Hubble Space Telescope with its relatively small mirror is unable to cope with the large contrast either.
However, the situation might not be as hopeless as it sounds.
These ground-based adaptive-optics observations will be carried out not at optical but at near- or mid-infrared wavelengths,
where planets are brighter and stars like the Sun are much dimmer, thus reducing the contrast problem. Moreover, the infrared
part of the spectrum is the most promising region to search for
the spectral fingerprint of atmospheric gases.
One group has taken a shot at imaging Epsilons planet already. Last August, shortly after Cochrans discovery announcement, a team led by Bruce Macintosh (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) imaged the star with Keck Observatorys
adaptive-optics system. Weve just started to analyze the data,
says Macintosh. Unfortunately, in August the Epsilon Eridani
planet was close to periastron [its orbital point closest to the
star], which of course makes it harder to see.
Macintosh is less pessimistic about the prospects of adaptive
optics than Woolf and Trauger. If planets are young, he says,
they will still retain heat from their original formation, and
hence still glow in the near-infrared. He thinks the current
Keck adaptive-optics system is capable of seeing a young Jupiter-size planet at 50 a.u. from a young star 150 light-years away.
If young giant planets exist in wide orbits, were now at the
point where we can see them. Macintosh says. Its just a matter
The power of nulling interferometry is clear from these two images
taken on February 17, 1998, by the Multiple Mirror Telescope on Mount
Hopkins, Arizona. The magnitude-0.9 star Aldebaran in Taurus is seen
sharp and clear (left) using constructive interference techniques. However, the bright object all but disappears (right) when nulling interferometery is employed. With this technique, planets that hide in the
bright glare of a companion star should easily come into view.

2001 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Pleiades

TAURUS
Aldebaran

Betelgeuse

ORION

Rigel

Epsilon Eridani
AKIRA FUJII

of looking at enough stars. My money is on adaptive optics.

Others believe that the first direct detection will come from interferometry: by coherently combining the light from two telescopes effectively creating a much larger telescope. In an optical
or infrared interferometer, light waves from two or more telescopes are co-added in phase, meaning that individual wave peaks
and troughs are matched. This technique used by radio astronomers for decades can enormously boost resolving power.
More important is the possibility to null the light of the central
star by canceling out the starlight while leaving its surroundings in
view. Nulling interferometry should be an effective way to get rid
of the overpowering starlight and reveal faint objects around it.
Ground-based observations using nulling interferometry
first took place in 1997 at the Multiple Mirror Telescope on
Mount Hopkins, Arizona, and within a few years the technique
will be tested at the twin 8.4-meter Large Binocular Telescope
on Mount Graham, Arizona. We are still finding that nulling
will probably be the easiest method to see planets, says Woolf.
Still others place their bets on a simpler technique known as
coronagraphy blocking the stars light physically. A highresolution imaging telescope in orbit, incorporating a coronagraph to block out the light of the central star, is probably the best
bet, says Cameron. Trauger believes that three important technological advances have aided the prospects for coronagraphy recently: precision deformable mirrors, affordable lightweight mirrors for space, and wavefront control techniques. All can now be
brought together in a concept for extremely high-contrast imaging
for the exploration of nearby planetary systems, Trauger says.
Together with a large group of collaborators, Trauger has
proposed to NASA a space-based coronagraph mission. Called
Eclipse, the proposed spacecraft features a 1.8-meter telescope and
a coronagraphic camera designed to minimize scattered and diffracted light. Out to some 30 light-years, every Jupiter-size planet
thats farther from its parent star than 3 a.u. should be detected. Epsilon Eridani would receive early attention, says Trauger.
However, many astronomers doubt that the planet of Epsilon
Eridani will be the first to be imaged directly by whatever method.
Its far away from its star, says ESOs Wiedemann, and therefore
dark and hard to see directly by reflected light. According to
Roger Angel, one of Woolfs Arizona collaborators, the hot Jupiter
of Tau Botis will probably be first, because it is much brighter.
Woolf suspects that the best candidates havent been found
yet. Trauger agrees. There may be many Jupiter-size exoplanets
with orbital radii greater than 3 a.u. that will appear by radialvelocity techniques in the future, he says, and these may prove
to be easier to detect by direct imaging than the Epsilon Eridani planet, a view that Macintosh fully subscribes to.
Fortunately, even more powerful instruments are coming soon.
The gigantic ground-based Atacama Large Millimeter Array in
northern Chile, scheduled to begin observations in 2006 (S&T:
August 2000, page 18), should detect young, hot extrasolar giants
out to tens of light-years. Further in the distance is the Next Generation Space Telescope, set for launch in 2009, which may detect
and image the infrared radiation from large exoplanets up to 30
light-years away. Then there is NASAs proposed Terrestrial Planet
Finder, set to launch around 2012. According to current plans, it
may also use nulling interferometry to image Earth-size planets
and maybe take their spectra. Perhaps their atmospheres will reveal the signatures of oxygen and ozone. Maybe they have oceans,
organic molecules, and photosynthesis. No one knows.
By then, astronomers expect to have detected many hundreds,

At magnitude 3.7, Epsilon Eridani is a relatively easy naked-eye star to

find. Its suspected planet remains much more elusive. Mars is seen
here in Taurus.

if not thousands, of alien worlds by indirect means. As time goes

by, radial-velocity searches will gain ever-longer time bases, enabling them to find more longer-period planets. Large groundbased telescopes will spectroscopically separate hot Jupiters from
their parent stars, possibly even enabling astronomers to sniff
their atmospheres. Future space missions like FAME, SIM, and
GAIA will find the reflex motions of vast numbers of planets,
while the detection of transits could become routine with Kepler.
The coming decade promises to provide astronomers with an
embarrassment of riches a multitude of worlds, just as Giordano Bruno dreamed. Some planetary systems will appear weird
and chaotic, while others may closely resemble our solar system.
Some may even harbor Earth-like planets with circular orbits in
their stars habitable zones. Even nearby Epsilon Eridani could
harbor a twin sister of Earth.
Whether or not this twin sister might be populated by intelligent aliens or photosynthetic plants is, of course, another
question altogether. After all, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has yielded no success thus far. Nevertheless, Frank
Drake stays optimistic. Any of the null results [to date] arent
even close to conclusive, he says. So, yes, we should do a comprehensive targeted search of Epsilon Eridani.
Maybe, just maybe, the first confirmation of Earth-like planets could come from the detection of radio broadcasts from
their inhabitants. And wouldnt that be far more spectacular
than capturing the planets image?
Govert Schilling is an S&T contributing editor. One of his many books
on astronomy, written in his native Dutch, Tweeling aarde (Twin Earth),
was about the search for extrasolar planets and life in the universe.

2001 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Sky & Telescope June 2001

41