Photo courtesy Massimo Marengo.

Epsilon Eri has a Planetary System Similar to Our Own

Located 3.2 pc away, Epsilon Eridani hosts the closest debris disk around a star similar to the early sun, and is a prime location to research how planets form around stars like our sun. With the new SOFIA images taken by Steward astronomer Kate Su and her collaborators, including Professor George Rieke and Steward postdoc Nick Ballering, confirm that Epsilon Eridani has an architecture remarkably similar to that of our solar system during its youth. You can read the story by the NASA Ames Research Center and University Communications, and the UANews about the SOFIA flight that made the observations.