Epsilon Eridani is the nearest star known to host both a giant planet and a dusty debris disk - a system that looks like the young Solar System, caught 600 million years in. The dust is the ground-up remains of collisions between planetesimals that never finished assembling.
Fly there in 3DIt has an asteroid belt at roughly 3 AU, a second belt near 20 AU, and an outer ring of icy debris at about 70 AU - the same three-tier architecture the Solar System has, around a star an eighth our age.
Spitzer and Herschel resolved the debris structure; the outer ring alone is comparable to a much heavier Kuiper belt.
Its proximity and Sun-like character made it a target of Project Ozma, the first modern SETI search, in 1960.
| Spectral type | K2 V |
| Surface temperature | 5,020 K |
| Mass | 0.82 solar masses |
| Radius | 0.759 solar radii |
| Luminosity | 0.381 times the Sun |
| Apparent magnitude | 3.73 |
| Age | about 0.6 billion years |
| Distance from the Sun | 10.5 light-years (3.2 parsecs) |
| Position (J2000) | RA 53.2327°, Dec -9.4583° |
| Constellation | Eridanus |
| Planet | Year | Orbit | Radius | Mass | Found |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Epsilon Eridani b | 7.3 years | 3.530 AU | 13.8 R⊕ estimated | 317.83 M⊕ | Radial Velocity, 2000 |
Values are the NASA Exoplanet Archive’s composite parameters. A radius marked estimated comes from a mass–radius relation; a mass marked minimum is M sin i. Planet sizes and colours in the 3D view are renderings: none of these worlds has been photographed as more than a point of light.