Update | Space odyssey to Alpha Centauri: where no one has gone before ... except in the movies and books
Researchers are studying how to travel to Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to Earth, but it has for years been featured widely in popular fiction from Star Trek to The Transformers
If space were indeed the final frontier, Alpha Centauri – the closest star system to the Sun – would certainly be the first stop.
When Captain James Kirk sailed by Alpha Centauri in his starship in the Star Trek series, he might well have encountered Avatar’s blue-skinned Neytiri training her dragon-bird on the Pandora moon, The Transformers’ Autobots looking for their lost planet Cybertron, or even The Three-Body Problem’s supercomputer Sophon on her way from planet Trisolaris to spy on Earth.
All these amazing fictional planets are located in the Alpha Centauri star system, 4.37 light years away from our solar system, making all the stories’ characters technically Alpha Centaurians.
If there were statistics on all of mankind’s imaginary interstellar space travels from Earth, Alpha Centauri – closer to us than any of the billions of other star systems in our infinite galaxy – would almost certainly be one of the busiest destinations.
Alpha Centauri comprises three stars: a pair of suns, Alpha Centauri A and B, and a small, faint red dwarf, Alpha Centauri C. To the naked eye, the trio together form the third brightest star in the night sky.