Recently in the Alpha Centauri Category

Giant exoplanets on wide orbits have been directly imaged around young stars. If the thermal background in the mid-infrared can be mitigated, then exoplanets with lower masses can also be imaged.

Breakthrough Watch, the global astronomical program looking for Earth-like planets around nearby stars, today announced a new observing technique with unprecedented sensitivity to directly image exoplanets. Their initial observations also resulted in the detection of a weak signal in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri A, part of the star system nearest to Earth.

Alpha Centauri A is the closest solar-type star to the Sun and offers an excellent opportunity to detect the thermal emission of a mature planet heated by its host star.

Breakthrough Watch, the global astronomical program looking for Earth-like planets around nearby stars, and the European Southern Observatory (ESO), Europe's foremost intergovernmental astronomical organization, today announced "first light" on a newly-built planet-finding instrument at ESO's Very Large Telescope in the Atacama desert, Chile.

The observational study of stars in the sub-millimetre regime has only rather recently begun and was made possible mainly by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).

The Alpha Centauri system is the primary target for planet search as it is the closest star system composed of a solar twin Alpha Centauri A, a K-dwarf Alpha Centauri B and an M-dwarf Proxima Centauri, which has a confirmed planet in the temperate zone.

In humanity's search for life outside our Solar System, one of the best places scientists have considered is Alpha Centauri, a system containing the three nearest stars beyond our Sun.

The two solar-like stars α Cen A and B have long served as cornerstones for stellar physics in virtue of their immediate proximity, association in a visual binary, and masses that bracket that of the Sun.

We perform long-term simulations, up to ten billion years, of closely-spaced configurations of 2 -- 6 planets, each as massive as the Earth, traveling on nested orbits about either stellar component in alpha Centauri AB.

Yale astronomers have taken a fresh look at the nearby Alpha Centauri star system and found new ways to narrow the search for habitable planets there.