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The bad news for Star Trek fans comes from an instrument known as NEID, a recent addition to the complex of telescopes at Kitt Peak National Observatory. NEID, like other radial velocity instruments, relies on the \u201cDoppler\u201d effect: shifts in the light spectrum of a star that reveal its wobbling motions. In this case, parsing out the supposed planet signal at various wavelengths of light, emitted from different levels of the star\u2019s outer shell, or photosphere, revealed significant differences between individual wavelength measurements \u2013 their Doppler shifts \u2013\u00a0and the total signal when they were all combined. That means, in all likelihood, the planet signal is really the flickering of something on the star\u2019s surface that coincides with a 42-day rotation \u2013 perhaps the roiling of hotter and cooler layers beneath the star\u2019s surface, called convection, combined with stellar surface features such as spots and \u201cplages,\u201d which are bright, active regions. Both can alter a star\u2019s radial velocity signals.<\/p>\n
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