Alpha Centauri – 10 Facts about Our Neighbor

The Solar System's nearest neighbor is the triple star system commonly known as Alpha Centauri. Two of the stars are similar to the Sun, and there are two confirmed planets orbiting a red dwarf.

Alpha Centauri – 10 Facts about Our Neighbor

Here's a photo of Crux and part of Centaurus. Note Alpha Centauri (which is a binary star), Proxima (the red dwarf with two super-earth planets) and Beta Centauri. Alpha and Beta Centauri are the "southern pointers" - they point to the red giant Gacrux at the head of the Southern Cross in the constellation Crux.

Image Credit & License: Y. Beletsky (LCO), ESO, Pale Red Dot Team

The nearest star to us - beyond the Sun, of course - is Proxima, part of the Alpha Centauri triplet. Proxima is a red dwarf star. Looking up at a clear, dark sky, you can see thousands of stars. Yet without binoculars or a telescope, this most common type of star is invisible. The small, cool red dwarfs fill the sky and live practically forever.

Do Red Dwarfs Live Forever

Alpha Centauri AB and Proxima Centauri.

Image Credit: ESO/B. Tafreshi (twanight.org)/Digitized Sky Survey 2
Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin/Mahdi Zamani
Universe Today

Planetary Landscapes writes:

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The View from Alpha Centauri | Growing up in the late 1960s and 1970s, I was an avid viewer of science fiction on television. Naturally, the programs I watched included the classic series Lost in Space where I learned the name of the first star I knew other than the Sun – Alpha Centauri (also written as α Centauri) which was the destination of the Robinson family flying on board the Jupiter 2. As a young budding astronomer in the early 1970s, I learned that α Centauri was the closest star system to the Sun and appeared as the third brightest star in our nighttime sky with a V magnitude, mV, of -0.27 (unfortunately, I could not see it from my home in New England).