Eduardo Bendek's ACEsat, conceived at NASA Ames by Bendek and Ruslan Belikov, seemed to change the paradigm for planet discovery around the nearest stellar system. The beauty of Alpha Centauri is that the two primary stars present large habitable zones as seen from...
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Upgraded Search for Alpha Centauri Planets
Breakthrough Starshot, the research and engineering effort to lay the groundwork for the launch of nanocraft to Alpha Centauri within a generation, is now investing in an attempt to learn a great deal more about possible planets around these stars. We already know...
Up Close at Alpha Centauri
In early December the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics offered as part of its fall colloquium series a talk by Harvard's Avi Loeb, fortunately captured on YouTube as Project Starshot: Visiting the Nearest Star Within Our Lifetime. We've looked at...
Project Blue: Imaging Alpha Centauri Planets
We know about an extremely interesting planet around Proxima Centauri, and there are even plans afoot (Breakthrough Starshot) to get probes into the Alpha Centauri system later in this century. But last April, when Breakthrough Initiatives held a conference at...
Alpha Centauri, SETI and Detectability
Heading for the hotel lobby the first night of the Breakthrough Discuss meeting, I thought about a major theme of the Breakthrough Starshot initiative: Making things smaller. Robert Forward wrote about sails hundreds of kilometers in diameter, and vast lenses deep in...
Focus on Alpha Centauri
At Palo Alto's superb Amber India, I was thinking about Alpha Centauri. There are several Amber India locations in the Bay area, but the Palo Alto restaurant dishes up, among other delights, a spicy scallop appetizer that is searingly hot and brilliantly spiced. Greg...
Breakthrough Starshot: Mission to Alpha Centauri
Here on Centauri Dreams we often discuss interstellar flight in a long-term context. Will humans ever travel to another star? I've stated my view that if this happens, it will probably take several hundred years before we develop the necessary energy resources to make...
ACEsat: Alpha Centauri and Direct Imaging
A dedicated spacecraft just to investigate the Alpha Centauri system? I've been fascinated with the nearest stars since boyhood, so the ACEsat concept Ashley Baldwin writes about today would have my endorsement. But budgetary realities and practical mission planning...
Alpha Centauri Planet Reconsidered
Finding a habitable world around any one of the three Alpha Centauri stars would be huge. If the closest of all stellar systems offered a blue and green target with an atmosphere showing biosignatures, interest in finding a way to get there would be intense. Draw in...
An Alpha Centauri Bb Transit Search
Alpha Centauri continues to be a maddening and elusive subject for study. Two decades of radial velocity work on Centauri A and B have been able to constrain the possibilities -- we've learned that there are no gas giants larger than Jupiter in orbits within 2 AU of...