When I was growing up, Alpha Centauri was utterly dismissed as a possible location for planets. A binary system couldn't possibly produce them, I read, and it was assumed that planets could only be found around single stars like our own Sun. How times have changed....
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Alpha Centauri Prize Announced
As we approach Starship Congress in Dallas, the Institute for Interstellar Studies has announced the creation of the Alpha Centauri Prize Awards, the first of which will be the 'Progenitor Award,' to be bestowed at this year's Starship Congress on August 18. The...
The Alpha Centauri Angle
Apropos of yesterday's article on the discovery of Proxima Centauri, it's worth noting that Murray Leinster's story "Proxima Centauri," which ran in Astounding Stories in March of 1935, was published just seven years after H. A. Alden's parallax findings demonstrated...
Alpha Centauri Sunrise
If the title of this piece conjures up exotic images, that's all to the good. In fact, I'm surprised that "Alpha Centauri Sunrise" hasn't been the title of a science fiction story somewhere along the line, but a quick check shows no such reference. Thus when Robert...
Talking Back from Alpha Centauri
Back when I was working on my Centauri Dreams book, JPL's James Lesh told me that the right way to do communications from Alpha Centauri was to use a laser. The problem is simple enough: Radio signals fall off in intensity with the square of their distance, so that a...
Alpha Centauri in Perspective
In his new article on Alpha Centauri in Astronomy & Geophysics, Martin Beech (Campion College, University of Regina) noted that the Alpha Centauri stars seem to go through waves of scientific interest. Beech used Google's Ngram Viewer to look for references to the...
On Super-Earths and Alpha Centauri
The discovery of Centauri B b, a small planet with a mass similar to Earth, continues to percolate in the news even if the initial buzz of discovery has worn off. Science News gives the new world a look in a recent article, noting the fact that with an orbital period...
Alpha Centauri and the New Astronomy
For much longer than the nine years Centauri Dreams has been in existence, I've been waiting for the announcement of a planetary discovery around Centauri B. And I'm delighted to turn the first announcement on this site over to Lee Billings, one of the most gifted...
To Alpha Centauri via Hawai’i
I’m always looking for ways to relate interstellar distances to common objects on Earth, knowing that misunderstandings about the vast scale of the universe are common. Sir John Herschel (1792-1871) talked about dropping a pea off the side of a ship after every mile...
Closing in on Alpha Centauri
Alpha Centauri is irresistible, a bright beacon in the southern skies that captures the imagination because it is our closest interstellar target. If we learn there are no planets in the habitable zones around Centauri A and B, we then have to look further afield,...