
Best image of Alpha Centauri A and B - upen
http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/4869.html
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manaskarekar
> They orbit a common centre of gravity once every 80 years, with a minimum
> distance of about _11 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun._

A.K.A an Astronomical Unit:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_unit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_unit)

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geon
Both stars are close to our sun in size.

The visible area in square-arc-seconds (and thus the brightness) of Beta as
seen from Alpha (and vice versa) should be about (1/11)^2 = 0.8 % or about the
same as an overcast day on Earth.

I think I read that stable planet orbits would be impossible, but I suppose a
planet could still have a stable orbit around one of the Lagrange points.

Then it should have each star at equal distance, at 90 deg angle, right? If
so, it would have 4 phases of daylight - night, Alpha, both suns and Beta.

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derwiki
The Barracuda filter at the hotel I'm staying at is blocking this site:

> The link you are accessing has been blocked by the Barracuda Web Filter
> because it contains spyware. The name of the spyware is:
> Spyware.Exploit.BRTS.sciencebulletin.org

A quick Google turned up nothing -- why is sciencebulletin.org considered
dangerous?

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arjie
Probably the usual, they were either compromised to serve up malware or their
mail server was compromised to serve up phishing emails and the like and the
blocklist hasn't been updated since when they fixed the issue.

To the site owner, contacting Barracuda is sufficient to get you off the list
if you're clean.

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anjc
Is the angular diameter of the stars in this picture still tiny, or are
scientists actually resolving discs now?

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jloughry
Still blurry, but astronomers have resolved the surface of a few stars:

Example:
[http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap981011.html](http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap981011.html)

List:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stars_with_resolved_im...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stars_with_resolved_images)

~~~
anjc
That's very cool. Thanks

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doctoboggan
How does Proxima Centauri play into this? I am assuming it isn't a trinary
star system, but they mention it being (roughly) the same distance away in the
same direction.

Also, are there planets in the binary Alpha Centauri system? Do they orbit the
common center of mass that the two stars orbit?

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schwede
We will get a better picture with the James Webb telescope?

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romanr
Just a lens flare

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StargazyPi
So this is an interesting point - the distinctive flare of astronomical photos
is caused by light diffracting around the mirror supports within the
telescope. We know the proportions of these, and could apply a transform that
approximately reverses the effect. So why is it never done?

I suppose the lens flare variant is prettier, and more star-like, but it would
be interesting to see the plain variant occasionally.

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thearn4
I think it's because the deconvolution is a bit tricky (with a few different
"knobs" to turn somewhat arbitrarily in the process), and can in some ways be
expected to add in more artifacts than it is subtracting.

