The far-left star in Orion’s belt, which Kirk cites as the home of a future author, is Alnitak
The far-left star in Orion’s belt, which Kirk cites as the home of a future author, is Alnitak, also known as Zeta Orionis.There’s some disagreement about how far away from us this star is, but it’s somewhere in the region 1000 light years. That’s a year away at warp 10, although as we’ve already learned, distance is pretty flexible in Star Trek.The star we call Alnitak is really a system of at least three stars. The main one is a blue supergiant somewhere between 14 and 30 times the mass of our Sun (depending on how far away it really is), and it has a companion of about half that mass orbiting pretty closely, at about the orbit of Saturn. There’s then a third star - around the same size as the smaller one in the main double system - orbiting about 75 times further away.Because these stars are so hot (more massive stars = hotter), the habitable zone is pretty far away - around 300 times further from the main star than Earth is from the Sun, or 10 times further out than Neptune. We don’t currently know of any planets in this system, but if one exists it hasn’t had much time to cool down, let alone evolve life: the larger and hotter a star is, the shorter its life, and these stars are only around 7 million years old. For comparison, we think it took around a billion years for life to arise on Earth, so we wouldn’t expect to see anything in this system. So this author wouldn’t be a species that originated on that planet, but maybe there’s a colony there on a still-cooling planet, for… reasons? Maybe his parents study planet formation and he grew up in a scientific research outpost? I’m going with that.(ETA: Thanks anon for pointing out my typo) -- source link
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