Proxima

Feb 18 2022

Interstellar travel: With the perfect sail to the stars

The StarShot project, launched by the Russian billionaire, aims to use lasers to bring tiny spaceships weighing only a few grams to such a speed that they can reach the stars closest to the sun in a generation instead of in a few tens of thousands of years - the time it would take for spaceships to reach them based on current or near-future technology. My readers are familiar with the concept from the Proxima trilogy. For this purpose, these mini-ships have a sail onto which the laser can fire. This sail, about three meters in diameter, must be…

Proxima

Feb 10 2022

Proxima Rising: New planet found near Proxima Centauri

Hm, the protagonists of my book "Proxima Rising" must have overlooked this: Around the star Proxima Centauri, which is closest to Earth, there are apparently even three planets orbiting. Already known were the planet Proxima b, about the size of Earth, on which Marchenko, Adam and Eve land in the novel, and which orbits its star once every eleven days in the habitable zone, as well as the planet candidate Proxima c, a mini-Neptune of seven times Earth's mass, which is in a five-year orbit around the star. Proxima d, the newly discovered planet using the European Southern Observatory's (ESO)…

Life

Dec 21 2020

Mysterious Signal from Proxima Centauri

"Towards the end of the 21st century, a call for help reaches Earth from the star closest to the sun, Proxima Centauri," begins the blurb for "Proxima Rising." The end of the century is still far off, but an apparently non-natural radio signal from the red dwarf has already reached us. The Guardian was the first to report it, and now the story is going around the world. The data in question was collected by the Parkes Observatory in Australia back on April 29, 2019. "This is the most exciting signal we've discovered in the Breakthrough Listen project," says…

The Very Large Telescope checks out the Alpha Centauri system

Life

Jun 30 2019

The Very Large Telescope checks out the Alpha Centauri system

The closest star system to our Sun (4.37 light-years away) consists of two Sun-like stars (Alpha Centauri A and B) and the red dwarf Proxima Centauri. Astronomers already discovered a rocky planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. But what about the binary Alpha Centauri system? A new instrument named NEAR and developed by the “Breakthrough Watch” Initiative and the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is set to find out. NEAR (Near Earths in the AlphaCen Region) is, above all, a so-called thermal infrared coronagraph. The instrument blocks out most of the light received from a target star and at the same time…