DESTINATION ALPHA CENTAURI

“With the lightest spacecraft ever built, we can launch a mission to Alpha Centauri within a generation” Stephen Hawking

If you gaze into the night sky from Earth’s Southern Hemisphere, you should be able to catch sight of our nearest stellar neighbour, Alpha Centauri. It appears to the naked eye as a single, brightly glowing celestial object and has long been a source of fascination for astronomers.

Alpha Centauri was discovered to be a binary star system in 1689, made up of Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B, and in 1915 a fainter star called Proxima Centauri was observed relatively close by. However, there has been some doubt cast over more recent theories about the star system. In October 2012 a team of European observers claimed to have evidence of an exoplanet orbiting Alpha Centauri B, and yet, almost exactly three years later, the theory was dismissed by a group of astronomers at Oxford University. Other theories relating to exoplanets within the star system are similarly up in the air.

The key issue with Alpha Centauri is that it is 4.37 light years away, and while Proxima Centauri is closer, it is still distant by a just-as-daunting 4.24 light years. Travelling to the star system would entail a journey of some 40 trillion kilometres (25 trillion miles), and with current spacecraft speeds, like NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, you’d have to be travelling for