Spock’s home world has been discovered (sort of)

Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, was visionary in many ways: The Enterprise crew’s communicators presaged today’s smartphones, Bones’s sickbay mirrored in modern medical scanners, and, well, we’re still working on that transporter. Now, it seems he accurately predicted a location for science officer Spock’s home planet, Vulcan.

The magazine Sky & Telescope reports this week that back in 1991, Roddenberry and three astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, declared in a letter to the magazine that Vulcan most likely would orbit the star 40 Eridani A. Although not mentioned in the original TV series or later feature films, a number of stars had been put forward by Trekkies as the likely locale of Vulcan. Roddenberry and his co-authors argued that 40 Eridani A was the most likely because, at 4 billion years old, an orbiting planet would have had long enough to evolve a superlogical being such as Spock.