When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Lasers could be used to propel tiny spacecraft toward Alpha Centauri, scientists suggest. | ...

Rob Wittenmyer receives funding from the Australian Research Council Discovery Grants program, supporting a campaign to detect Earth-mass planets in the Alpha Centauri system. The candidate planet – ...

One million alien visitors from another star system could already be lurking in the solar system. We aren't talking about "little green men" here, however — more "little (and not so little) gray rocks ...

Our nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri, is 4.37 light-years from Earth, which is super close from a cosmological perspective but achingly far from a human point of view. A new telescope promises to ...

This is the Lambda Centauri nebula, a star-forming cloud in our Milky Way galaxy, also known as the Running Chicken nebula. NASA Alpha Centauri is the brightest star in the constellation Centaurus. It ...

Our stellar next-door neighbors, Alpha Centauri A (left) and B, shine brightly in this Hubble Space Telescope image. Currently the premier organization dedicated to searching for advanced life in the ...

Researchers announced today that they've discovered an Earth-sized planet orbiting our nearest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri. The planet is too close to the sun to have liquid water, and therefore ...

Outer space is big. Really, really, really big. And that's why NASA has no plans at present to send a spacecraft to any of the 1,876 known planets (as of January 9, 2015) beyond our solar system.

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. According to a study led by Professor Debra ...

The ESO’s Very Large Telescope looms in the foreground of this image, and a star map has been superimposed on the night sky to show the locations of Alpha Centauri and Proxima Centauri. (ESO Photo) ...

Since Earth is the only known inhabited planet and we happen to live here, it’s only natural to regard it as the ideal place for life to exist, and to assume that another life-bearing planet would be ...

EXOPLANETS—those that orbit stars other than the sun—are one of the hottest topics in astronomy. The first was found in 1992, going round a neutron star (a strange beast made of matter as dense as ...