Here’s an interesting thought. We know that at least two objects from outside our Solar System have appeared in our skies, the comet 2I/Borisov and the still enigmatic object called ‘Oumuamua. Most attention on these visitors has focused on their composition and the...
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The Odds on Alpha Centauri
How extraordinary that the nearest star to Earth is actually a triple system, the tight central binary visually merged as one bright object, the third star lost in the background field but still a relatively close 13000 or so AU from the others. Humans couldn’t have a...
Alpha Centauri: TOLIMAN Moves Forward
The problem with Alpha Centauri is that the system is too close. I don’t refer to its 4.3 light year distance from Sol, which makes these stars targets for future interstellar probes, but rather the distance of the two primary stars, Centauri A and B, from each other....
Alpha Centauri and the Search for Technosignatures
Is there any chance we may one day find technosignatures around the nearest stars? If we were to detect such, on a planet, say, orbiting Alpha Centauri B, that would seem to indicate that civilizations are to be found around a high percentage of G- and K-class stars....
TOLIMAN: Looking for Earth Mass Planets at Alpha Centauri
Why the renewed focus on astrometry when it comes to Alpha Centauri (a theme we saw as well in the previous post on ALMA observations from the surface)? One problem we face with other detection methods is simply statistical: We can study planets, as via the Kepler...
Imaging an Alpha Centauri Planet
At some point, and probably soon, we're going to be able to identify planets around Alpha Centauri A and B, assuming they are there and of a size sufficient for our methods. We may even be able to image one. Already we have an extremely tentative candidate around...
Imaging Alpha Centauri’s Habitable Zones
We may or may not have imaged a planet around Alpha Centauri A, possibly a ‘warm Neptune’ at an orbital distance of roughly 1 AU, the distance between Earth and the Sun. Let’s quickly move to the caveat: This finding is not a verified planet, and may in fact be an...
Finding Alpha Centauri
It's always breathtaking to see the band of the Milky Way under good viewing conditions. I remember so well the night I saw it best, about 20 years ago on a cold, absolutely clear night from a boat in the middle of Lake George. This is up in New York's Adirondacks,...
Scouting Alpha Centauri at X-ray Wavelengths
One of the benefits of having Alpha Centauri as our closest stellar neighbor is that this system comprises three different kinds of star. We have the familiar Centauri A, a G-class star much like our Sun, along with the smaller Centauri B, a K-class star with about 90...
What We Can Rule Out at Alpha Centauri
One of the reasons to pay attention to spectrograph technologies -- and we recently talked about ESPRESSO, which has just achieved ‘first light’ -- is that we’re reaching the inflection point when it comes to certain key observations. Finding planets around Centauri A...