Just about every house has a room where projects go to die.
The old computer that you were going to refurbish and give to charity, that set of fabric swatches that were meant to be a quilt, your brief and ill-advised fling with oil painting—all the remnants of things that could have been, but were instead swept into a less-traveled area and left to mingle and collect dust.
In our solar system, the junk room is the main asteroid belt, a region between Mars and Jupiter full of pieces that could have been planets.
Thanks to mighty Jupiter's gravity, those pieces of rocky and metallic debris just won't coalesce into planets, leaving us with plenty of fodder for the next doomsday scenario.
Now it turns out that our closest stellar neighbor, a sunlike star called Epsilon Eridani, has not one asteroid belt, but two: one in roughly the same spot as our belt and another about as far from the star as Uranus is from the sun.
—Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech
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