The Closest Star System To Ours Doesn’t Have Any Planets (Yet), After All
Four years ago, the world was shaken with the announcement of a planet around Alpha Centauri. But was it real?
Published in
5 min readJan 13, 2016
“You’re on Earth. There’s no cure for that.” -Samuel Beckett
If you had looked to the skies just 25 years ago, you’d only be able to wonder about planets around other stars. “They must be there,” you’d reason, “since there’s no way our Solar System is unique in all the galaxy.” But where’s the proof? As the case always is in science, it’s in the data you collect and in the measurements and observations you make.
Over the past generation, we’ve not only successfully found thousands of planets by multiple different methods, but we’ve been able to measure:
- their mass (by the pull on their parent star),
- their radius (by the amount of light that they block),
- and their orbital period (by measuring… their orbital period).
Our limitations are that our current techniques were only really useful for measuring certain kinds of planets.
