82 Eridani is a star about 20.2 light years away from Earth. It is in constellation Eridanus. The Pleiades star cluster A star is any massive gaseous body in outer space, just like the Sun. ... The Pleiades star cluster A star is any massive gaseous body in outer space, just like the Sun. ... A light year, abbreviated ly, is the distance light travels in one year: roughly 9. ... Eridanus is the sixth largest of the 88 modern constellations. ...
The star is a main sequence star of spectral type G5. Hertzsprung-Russell diagram The main sequence of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram is the curve where the majority of stars are located in this diagram. ... In astronomy, stellar classification is a classification of stars based initially on photospheric temperature and its associated spectral characteristics, and subsequenly refined in terms of other characteristics. ...
As 82Eridani has become one of the top 100 target stars for NASA's planned Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF), images of this star and its position relative to the Milky Way in Earth's night sky are now available from the TPF-C team.
Indeed, 82Eridani's low metallicity and high space velocity, and its substantial galactic orbital eccentricity (e= 0.40) suggest that it may be more than 10 billion years old (see Table 1 for HD 20794 in Olin Jeuck Eggen, 1998 (1919-1998); and John B.
However, the distance from 82Eridani A where an Earth-type planet would be "comfortable" with liquid water is centered around 0.80 AU -- midway between the orbital distances of Venus and Earth in the Solar System.
82Eridani was long known to have an Earthlike world from remote observation, and so it had become a natural target for colonization.
It recent years, it had been theorized that these asteroids, averaging in size of about 3 kilometers, were the remnants of a shattered comet that had migrated in from the Oort Cloud and which had passed too close to the sun, shattering in the gravitational flux.
Only in the 82Eridani System, and a few others, has it been discovered in a space-based setting that can be explained by wandering interstellar debris.
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