Solar system's young twin has two asteroid belts

[tblaxland]

Solar system's young twin has two asteroid belts:
http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0810/27asteroidbelts/

Astronomers have discovered that the nearby star Epsilon Eridani has two rocky asteroid belts and an outer icy ring, making it a triple-ring system. The inner asteroid belt is a virtual twin of the belt in our solar system, while the outer asteroid belt holds 20 times more material. Moreover, the presence of these three rings of material implies that unseen planets confine and shape them.

 

[Andy44]

How cool would it be to travel there...

I have read science fiction set in that system, and now we have real facts. How cool is that?

 

[tblaxland]

How cool would it be to travel there...

Uber-cool. Only 10.5 ly

 

[JamesG]

At 1000 times accelleration in Orbiter it will only take you about that long to get there.

(no I don't feel like doing the Math)

 

[pattersoncr]

How cool would it be to travel there...

I have read science fiction set in that system, and now we have real facts. How cool is that?

Wasn't planet Vulcan supposed to be in Epsilon Eridani?

 

[SiberianTiger]

Wasn't planet Vulcan supposed to be in Epsilon Eridani?

No, mate, this is the Babylon 5. And the Great Machine, of course.

 

[cjp]

Wasn't planet Vulcan supposed to be in Epsilon Eridani?

No, it was 40 Eridani:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_(Star_Trek_planet)

This is amazing news BTW. We seem to be increasingly more capable of detecting things around stars. How did they manage to see these belts?

My dream is, before we are able to travel to such systems, to build a series of Hubble-like telescopes, and launch them on escape trajectories out of the solar system. Together, they would form a huge telescopic array, potentially capable of maybe even making pictures of the surface of extrasolar planets.

I haven't worked out the math yet, so I don't know whether this idea actually makes sense. But if it does, it would be great.

 

[JamesG]

They don't even need to be extra solar. Just park them on Martian/Sun Lagrange points (or Jupiter's) That will give a quite huge interferonmetry array. Maybe a couple in wide sun polar orbits to make observations around the ecliptic twice a "year".