What is the bizarre bright spot in the image obtained by the astronomers?
“There may be a planet stirring up the dust in the ring and causing the bright spot,” said Bill Dent of the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, “or it could be the remnants of a massive collision between comets.” Epsilon Eridani is about three-quarters as massive as the sun, but only one-third as luminous. When astronomer Frank Drake conducted the first serious search for radio signals from other civilizations in the late 1950s, Epsilon Eridani was one of the first two stars he studied. Today, researchers know something Drake did not: Epsilon Eridani is much too young to have intelligent life. However, the new image shows there may be at least one planet, and perhaps life in the future. In addition to Greaves, Holland, Zuckerman and Dent, the astronomers on the project are Gerald Moriarty-Schieven and Tim Jenness at JAC; Harold Butner at the University of Arizona, Tucson; Walter Gear at University College London; Helen Walker at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory; and UCLA graduate students
