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 ...

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.

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.

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 ...

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, ...

Compared to the sun, Alpha Centauri A is of the same stellar type, G2, and slightly bigger, ... And they are also among the prime targets in the hunt for habitable exoplanets.

Project Blue is a space science mission utilizing new developments in advanced optical telescope design to discover potentially habitable exoplanets in Earth’s neighboring star system, Alpha ...

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, ...

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.

"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.