Ypsilon/Origin

{| border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="1" class="article-table" style="width: 660px;"

Origin
Epsilon Eridani is a star in the southern constellation Eridanus, along a declination 9.46° south of the celestial equator. This allows the star to be viewed from most of the Earth's surface. At a distance of 10.5 light years (ly), it has an apparent magnitude of 3.73. It is the third closest of the individual stars or star systems visible to the unaided eye and was the closest star known to host a planet until the discovery of Alpha Centauri Bb. Its age is estimated at less than a billion years. Because of its youth, Epsilon Eridani has a higher level of magnetic activity than the present-day Sun, with a stellar wind 30 times as strong. Its rotation period is 11.2 days at the equator. Epsilon Eridani is smaller and less massive than the Sun, and has a comparatively lower level of elements heavier than helium. Astronomers categorize it as a main-sequence star of spectral class K2, which means that energy generated at the core through nuclear fusion of hydrogen is emitted from the surface at a temperature of about 5,000 K, giving the star an orange hue. The motion of this star along the line of sight to the Earth, known as the radial velocity, has been regularly observed for more than twenty years. Periodic changes in this data yielded evidence of a giant planet orbiting Epsilon Eridani, making it one of the nearest extrasolar system with a candidate exoplanet. This object, Epsilon Eridani b, was formally announced in 2000 by a team of astronomers led by Artie Hatzes. Current data indicate that this planet orbits with a period of about 7 years at a mean separation of 3.4 astronomical units (AU), where 1 AU is the mean distance between the Earth and the Sun. Although this discovery has been controversial because of the amount of background noise in the radial velocity data, many astronomers now regard the planet as confirmed.