The dream of interstellar travel is becoming increasingly real, and Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to Earth, is at ...

Astronomers have made an exciting discovery—a new Earth-like exoplanet, Proxima b, located in the Alpha Centauri system. This ...

The Centauri system contains a few more stars, though. Now, the Very Large Telescope (VLT) has gotten an upgrade that will help it scan those other stars for evidence of exoplanets (Opens in a new ...

Centauri A/B will join the nearly 5,000 exoplanets that have been discovered since 1995, when the University of Geneva astrophysicists Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz (who joined the faculty at ETH ...

Now a just-announced collaboration called Project Blue has been founded to launch a lightweight, low-overhead space telescope, to look at the two largest stars in that system, Alpha Centauri A and B.

Only the three stars in the Alpha Centauri system, about 4 light-years away, are closer. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles.

Alpha Centauri is about 4.4 light-years (roughly 25 trillion miles, or 40 trillion kilometers) from Earth and is home to three separate stars. The closest star, Proxima Centauri, ...

"I think that we will reach the Alpha Centauri system, with small probes launching in the decade of the 2040s, and thus arriving in the 2060s," Eubanks said.

The tiny spacecraft would first need to approach the star Alpha Centauri A as close as around four million kilometres, corresponding to five stellar radii, at a maximum speed of 13,800 kilometres ...

Alpha Centauri is racing toward us at 0.007 light-years per century (80,000 kilometers per hour) and will be closest 28,000 years from now, when it will be 3.2 light-years from Earth.

Alpha Centauri is a mature star system, at 5 billion years old. This means that most of the material in this system’s protoplanetary disk has likely already dissipated, ...