Less than five light years away sit three stars orbiting each other. You probably remember that one of them, Proxima Centauri, has a planet orbiting in its habitable zone—which got us really excited about the possibility of life. But what if that star was stolen?
Last year, Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner hatched an ambitious plan to send a tiny probe to the Alpha Centauri star system. Travelling at 20 percent the speed of light, the researchers weren’t entirely sure how the probe was supposed to stop once it arrived at its destination, or whether it would…
When astronomers confirmed the discovery of an Earth-sized world orbiting Proxima Centauri just 4.25 light years away, hopes were ignited that there may be more planetary real estate in our cosmic neighborhood. To find out, a team of ex-NASA scientists is now seeking private funding to scour the Alpha Centauri system…
Exoplanets are all the rage nowadays thanks in part to Kepler’s discovery of around 1,284 previously undiscovered planets and our never-ending fascination with the “final frontier” that just seems to be moving closer to a reality. But out of the thousands of planets that we know of, how many are set to support life?
Earlier today, Stephen Hawking and Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner announced a thrilling plan to deploy tiny “nanocrafts” to the second-closest star in search of intelligent life. And in the first post-announcement interview with ABC News, Hawking talks about how the development of interstellar spacecraft will…
The triple star system of Alpha Centauri is only 4.3 light-years—about 25 trillion miles—away. The possibility of an earth-like world orbiting our nearest neighbor has been a kind of holy grail of astronomy — and something taken for granted by countless SciFi authors.
Yesterday, the European Southern Observatory announced they'd confirmed the existence of a planet in Alpha Centauri, the star system nearest to Earth. For many of us, it was like a dream come true. In the annals of science fiction, Alpha Centauri is like the Mars of star systems. Because it's the closest system to…
Holy sci-fi awesome space balls. European astronomers have discovered an alien planet in Alpha Centauri, the star system that's pretty much our neighbor. The planet, which is Earth-sized, is only 4.3 light years away.
This is huge. We've discovered a lot of exoplanets, including rocky Earth-like ones, in far-away star systems. But the European Southern Observatory (ESO) announced this afternoon that our solar system's nearest neighbor, a brilliant trinary star system called Alpha Centauri, has a planet that's roughly the mass of…
Located just 4.3 light-years away, the Alpha Centauri star system is our closest neighbor. But theirs is a very different solar system, as it's home with not one, not two, but three stars. Here's the short guide to Alpha Centauri.
The Sun's tremendous gravitational pull actually warps the fabric of space around it, creating focal points where light comes together. We could use these focal points to build the most powerful telescopes ever and communicate with spaceships in Alpha Centauri.
If you take humanity's current energy and technological capacity and project a steady increase into the future, the chances of us reaching the stars any time soon look bleak. Even our nearest stellar neighbor is at least 300 years away.