Tau Ceti: The closest single sun-like star
Dan WildIt was Frank Drake (1930-2022) who brought Tau Ceti to the attention of science-fiction. In 1960, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Greenbank, West Virginia, granted him access to the Tatel radio telescope. What started out as Project Ozma later became SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Drake’s first major contribution to SETI was to …
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Alpha Centauri: Two bright princesses and a red dwarf
Dan WildI remember as a teenager, blinking though binoculars, excited that I could just make out Alpha Centauri as a double star. Then I borrowed a low-end refractor telescope and could more easily make out the binary nature of the pair. It was the Jesuit, Father Jean Richaud (1633-1693), who first determined the binary using his …
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