q1 Eridani is the Bayer designation for a star usually known with the Henry Draper catalogue (HD) number 10647. It is a relatively nearby 6th (almost 5th) magnitude star in the constellation of Eridanus. It is a yellow-white dwarf, only a slightly hotter (6143 K) and 50% more luminous than the Sun. It is also younger being 1,750 million years old.
The star should be visible to the unaided eye under very dark skies, but with binoculars it is an easy target.
Discovery of an extrasolar planet orbiting the star was announced in June, 2003 by Michel Mayor et al. in Paris at the XIX IAP Colloquium Extrasolar Planets: Today & Tormorrow.
The ISO infrared space telescope detected a large excess of infrared radiation from the star, indicating a possible circumstellar disk around the star. Because of the age of the star, the disk probably somewhat similar to our Solar system's Kuiper Belt instead of a protoplanetary disk seen around young stars like Vega.
q1 Eridani b
The planet, q1 Eridani b, is at least 90% as massive as Jupiter and orbits the star at a distance of 2.10 AU, slightly more than twice the distance Earth orbits the Sun. The orbit is somewhat eccentric.
The Anglo-Australian Planet Search team could not detect the planet, but that can be due to the poor coverage of observations. The star is also chromospherically active making radial velocity observations more difficult.
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Last updated: 05-26-2005 22:45:53
