Far Far away, in a Star System not so different from ours, we might find Vulcan (that sounds like StarWars..ewww). Using some interesting data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, Dr Massimo Marengo of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics & Dr Dana Backman of the SETI(Search for Extraterrestrial Intelegence) Institute are claiming that there's a star system which is a younger twin of our star system, the solar system. This Star system is 10.5 light-years away from ours which makes it a long journey. Nothing surprising, until they tell you that the star is called "Epsilon Eridani" which just happens to be the legendary home star of a Mr. Spock from the Star Trek. According to Marengo, they have a pretty good idea of how it looks like:

"Studying Epsilon Eridani [artist representation above] is like having a time machine to look at our solar system when it was young. This system probably looks a lot like ours did when life first took root on Earth. Epsilon Eridani looks a lot like the young solar system, so it's conceivable that it will evolve similarly."

Looking at the Spitzer data, the Epsilon Eriadni star system should have at least three planets in orbit as, according to them, this is the only way to explain its asteroid belt configuration, which is very similar to our own, but in a more primitive state.

These include one inner asteroid belt which is a virtual duplicate to the one between Mars and Jupiter. There's also an outer ring similar to the Kuiper Belt. The outer belt holds atleast 100 more minerals than ours because it hasn't got through a process called the Late Heavy Bombardment yet. In theory, this happened when our solar system's planets attracted much of the Kuiper belt into the inner orbits. Finally, there's a third belt located in the equivalent orbit of Uranus, with as much mass as our Moon.

According to Marengo, "planets are the easiest way to explain what we're seeing." (now this sounds freaking)

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