Exploring the Final Frontier: The Quest to Find Vulcan, Spock's Legendary Home

The heavens are man’s most profound enigma. In the eerie darkness, the cosmos promises a silence broken by endless stories, beckoning us to other worlds beside our own. Among them is the alien planet that for decades has double-dared science fiction fans and astronomers alike: the realm of Vulcan. Its story is a bible of sci-fi misconception, a true-life tale of myth-busting so entwined with the fictional it threatens the very fabric of everything we thought we knew about Spock’s homeland.

The Misidentification of Vulcan: A Stellar Misstep

Yet a group of intrepid astronomers have just popped the Star Trek bubble of science-geek enthusiasts who had been talking up Vulcan as if it were real. The era of making a mid-air lunge for Spock’s position has been pronounced over. But it has implications for another pop-culture empire, too, as the discovery of exoplanets shows us the art of myth-making is just as important, if not more so, than the search for distant worlds. Until recently, it was assumed that a series of supernovae had blasted Vulcan out of the system, no longer revolving around the star HD 26965 (where it was thought to reside) — somewhere in the constellation Lyra, more than 100 light years away from Earth. But, in March, a team of intrepid astronomers claimed that no such star even exists, undoing the longstanding work of devout Trekkers. Scholars may stumble into dubious myths while attempting to find out about other worlds, but it is the very nature of exoplanetary science as an emergent discipline that can make determining what is true in the first place extraordinarily hard to do.

A Discovery That Captivated the Cosmos

In 2019, an astronomical team from the University of Florida announced the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a sunlike star, HD 26965, at a distance of approximately 16 light-years away from Earth. In a nod to the half-human, half-Vulcan science officer of the USS Enterprise, they named this new world Vulcan. The news sent shockwaves through the online world, as science and science fiction alike celebrated the discovery.

From Certainty to Controversy: Unveiling Vulcan's True Nature

But here’s where it gets even more sinister: a year ago, another study was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society that re-analysed the data with more sophisticated techniques, discarding the now-discredited Chodas-Holman observations, and proclaimed that the Vulcanian detected wasn’t actually such a big deal – it was a much larger, hotter, grayer planet altogether, definitely not a Star Trek vulcan.

The Technical Turn: Refining the Search for Exoplanets

The big initial discovery was based on radial velocity, a highly sensitive technique for measuring planets via the subtle stellar wobbles they provoke in their parent stars. But it was the transit technique (measuring the slight dimming of a star as a planet passes across it) that confirmed the nature of this ersatz Vulcan. It was a planet almost twice the radius of Earth orbiting about 20 times closer to its star than Mercury does to our Sun – and nothing like the temperate Vulcan we envision.

The Continual Quest: Beyond the Mistake

This mistake shows not just the difficulty of finding exoplanets, but also the sheer joy of discovery. Every finding, whether it confirms or disproves our hypotheses, is a step towards making sense of the universe. But for Star Trek fans, the story isn’t over. The search for Vulcan, a beacon of unity in diversity and logic in the face of uncertainty, continues.

A Universe of Possibilities: What Lies Ahead

Our instruments and methods get sharper, our view of the heavens gets clearer, and our esoteric hobby of hunting for Vulcans in the void gets more stubborn, and no less imaginative. Maybe, on some distant, distant world, a planet passes in front of its star, and someone on that exo-Vulcan looks up, also with a constipated expression and says: ‘He’s just messing with us.’ Live long and prosper.

Understanding the Essence of HOME

Underlying it all, though, was a powerful human desire for home. Vulcan was the planet that specifically helped us cultivate an intimate and cosy identification with our home on Earth. At the building of the telescope, the astronomer Maria Mitchell said that stargazing unites us with ‘the profoundest cravings of the human soul’ – and the desire to be at home was one of those stars we yearned to see twinkling. When it comes to stars and homes, our search for other worlds is also a search for ourselves.