Alpha Centauri - Observational History

Observational History

The binary nature of Alpha Centauri AB was first recognized in December 1689 by astronomer and Jesuit priest Jean Richaud. The finding was made incidentally while observing a passing comet from his station at the Indian city of Pondicherry. Alpha centauri was only the second binary star system to be discovered, preceded only by Alpha Crucis. By 1752, French astronomer Abbé Nicolas Louis de Lacaille made astrometric positional measurements using a meridian circle while John Herschel, in 1834, made the first micrometrical observations. Since the early 20th Century, measures have been made with photographic plates.

By 1926, South African astronomer William Stephen Finsen calculated the approximate orbit elements close to those now accepted for this system. All future positions are now sufficiently accurate for visual observers to determine the relative places of the stars from a binary star ephemeris. Others, like the Belgian astronomer D. Pourbaix (2002), have regularly refined the precision of any new published orbital elements.

Alpha Centauri is the closest star system to the Solar System. It lies about 4.37 light-years in distance, or about 41.5 trillion kilometres, 25.8 trillion miles or 277,600 AU. Astronomer Thomas James Henderson made the original discovery from many exacting observations of the trigonometric parallaxes of the AB system between April 1832 and May 1833. He withheld the results because he suspected they were too large to be true, but eventually published in 1839 after Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel released his own accurately determined parallax for 61 Cygni in 1838. For this reason, Alpha Centauri is considered as the second star to have its distance measured because it was not formally recognized first.

R.T.A. Innes from South Africa discovered Proxima Centauri in 1915 by blinking photographic plates taken at different times during a dedicated proper motion survey. This showed the large proper motion and parallax of the star was similar in both size and direction to those of Alpha Centauri AB, suggesting immediately it was part of the system and slightly closer to us than Alpha Centauri AB. Lying 4.22 light-years away, Proxima Centauri is the nearest star to the Sun. All current derived distances for the three stars are presently from the parallaxes obtained from the Hipparcos star catalog (HIP).