TWO stars of the Alpha Centauri system have officially become astronomy’s best-known stars.
Alpha Centauri is a triple star system containing two Sun-like stars and a red dwarf. At just over 4 light years away, these are the Sun’s nearest stellar neighbours.
An international team of astronomers has used the Very Large Telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile to measure the width of the two larger stars directly for the first time. They are 1.227 and 0.865 times as wide as the Sun.
Because astronomers already have a wealth of accurate facts and figures about these nearby stars, such…
