I recently broke the hearts of Star Trek fans.
In a paper for the Astrophysical Journal, my colleagues and I looked at several star systems to see which might be most likely to be compatible with life. One of those was the star Tau Ceti, which is the closest sunlike star to Earth, making it popular in science fiction, including the Star Trek universe. But we found that Tau Ceti has an unusual ratio with other important rock-forming elements, magnesium and silicon. It lies on the high end of the magnesium-to-silicon scale, with a ratio of 1.8 in favor of magnesium. It is 70 percent more magnesium-rich than our sun.
Because of the unusual composition of Tau Ceti, we put it low on our list of potentially habitable star systems. When they saw the results, Star Trek fans were disappointed: One of their favorite solar systems—home of the Traveler and the spacecraft Kobayashi Maru—had been demoted. Social media was teeming with comments like “This delivers an unfortunate swat to the dreams of many.”
But this isn’t bad news! Tau Ceti may not host alien life, but it would be amazing to observe a planet so vastly different than Earth, even if the differences are mostly scientific jargon at the moment. Science fiction gets one thing right: We live in a strange universe of constantly surprising discoveries.
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