Recently in the Alpha Centauri Category

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.

We use more than a decade of radial velocity measurements for α Cen A, B, and Proxima Centauri from HARPS, CHIRON, and UVES to identify the Msini and orbital periods of planets that could have been detected if they existed.

The deadline is quickly approaching for the BoldlyGo Institute crowdfunding campaign to search for Earth-like planets circling Alpha Centauri. All donations are now being doubled - matched dollar-for-dollar by a generous donor.