Alpha Centauri

“ Alpha Centauri is the last of her name; should she die unmated the Great Family becomes extinct. The marriage may take place, but the Priestess of the Sun is a superb enigma, unapproachable, illusive as the star which guides the destiny of her family. ”

“ The Great Family is supreme, and Alpha, my Alpha, is Princess of Centauri.
One continual nationality lacks individuality; travel in my world is far more interesting, yet Centauri is beautiful, a wonderful vision of superb development; but see one city and you've seen them all.
Alpha Centauri entered these marvelous cities quivering with expectations, radiant with hope, but departure was invariably hastened by bitter disappointment and, in despair, she finally suggested the return to Centur. ”

“ Suddenly our ship blazed with lights and the Centauri banners were hoisted. We cut sharply across the heavens separating entirely from the speeding sightseers, our lights only distinguishable. No one dreamed Alpha Centauri was returning to Centur. ”

“ However, as the three space travelers gazed they were gradually able to make out the great dipper, Orion, and a few other of the more familiar star-groups; but now completely reversed, Alpha Centauri, from which they had come, was now directly ahead. ”

“ The ideal has no rival; I am true, faithful to my creation. Alpha Centauri never was divine. Her beauty pales before the gorgeousness of my ideal. The love-lorn Virgillius is dead. It is the same old Salucci itching for a new sensation."
I followed Mike. He regarded me curiously. "Alpha Centauri is grieved at your delay," he remarked.
I shrugged my shoulders, astonished at my indifference, but sighed deeply as I saluted the exquisite creature reclining upon a skin-covered couch with a background of huge white blossoms whose heavy fragrance consumed the air. ”

“ Makvern said, "but it's insignificant and did not prevent the formation of a stable planetary system around the primary. Alpha Centauri has eight planets—it's very much like your own Sol. The two inner planets are too hot, and the outer ones are too cold, but the third and fourth support life. The third is closer to the sun than Earth and is still in a comparatively primitive stage of evolution. We can pick up minerals there but nothing else. The fourth world is our target." ”

“ It requires four and one-quarter years for a beam of light to travel from this star to earth at the rate of 186,000 miles a second, thus showing that Alpha Centauri is about two hundred and seventy-five thousand times as far from us as is the sun, in other words, more than 25,575,000,000,000 miles, which, expressed in our notation, reads twenty-five trillion, five hundred and seventy- five billion miles, a number which the mind of man is incapable of grasping. ”

“ Unthinkable as this number of miles may seem, it is such a short distance across the fields of the heavens that Alpha Centauri and our sun would appear to be very close together as seen from the planets of other stars. Thus our kingdom of the sun is not an isolated isle among the dim star-lights of space, but shines as one of the stars in a community of such kingdoms. ”

“ It is certainly true that we will never know, now, whether Alpha Centauri A ever had any planets. But, in another way, it is extremely fortunate that we should be so near a stellar explosion because of the wealth of scientific information we can obtain. ”

“ In other words, the zodiacal light is probably a swarm of infinitesimal planets; the greater part of the cluster being interior to Mercury's orbit.
The distances between the different members of our planetary system, vast as they may seem, sink into insignificance when compared with the intervals which separate us from the so-called fixed stars. Alpha Centauri, the nearest of those twinkling luminaries, is 7000 times more distant than Neptune from the sun. Even light itself, which moves 185,000 miles in a second, is more than three years in traversing the mighty interval. ”

“ The nearest star to the earth, Alpha Centauri, although probably equal to our sun in volume, certainly does not exceed one-hundredth of a second in diameter as seen from the earth. But in the case of the Andromeda nebula we have an object of considerable apparent size, not measured by seconds of arc, but showing an area about three times greater than that of the full moon. The nebula certainly lies in the region of the stars—much farther off than [Pg 199] Alpha Centauri—and its great apparent size shows that it must be of stupendous dimensions. ”

“ Our astronomical unit and standard of measurement is the distance of the earth from the sun—92,500,000 miles. This is the golden reed with which we measure the celestial city. Thus, by laying down our astronomical unit 226,000 times, we measure to Alpha Centauri, more than twenty millions of millions of miles. Doubtless other suns are as far from Alpha Centauri and each other as that is from ours.
Stars are not near or far according to their brightness. 61 Cygni is a telescopic star, while Sirius, the brightest star in the heavens, is twice as far away from us. ”

“ Were then this star to be suddenly removed from the universe at any moment, we should continue to see it still in its place in the sky for some four years more, after which it would suddenly disappear. The rays which had already started upon their journey towards our earth must indeed continue travelling, and reaching us in their turn until the last one had arrived; after which no more would come.
We have drawn attention to Alpha Centauri as the nearest of the stars. The majority of the others indeed are ever so much farther. ”

“ My eyes suddenly fastened upon a hideous stone figure, the trunk of a woman resting upon a gem-incrusted pedestal.
"That is the form of the beauteous Alpha Centauri, who reigned during the petrified age," the guide informed me. "It is very pathetic, and marks petrification a failure. The lower portion of the body has crumpled away; the pedestal contains the powder. Before long what remains will be dust, then the pedestal will be sealed."
"Why so much splendor for the Great Family if all Centaurians are equal?" ”

“ Nobody can pretend to be profoundly immersed in the internal affairs of Sirius or of Alpha Centauri. A fiery revolution in the belt of Orion would affect us less than a passing finger-ache in a certain single terrestrial baby of our own household. Therefore I shall not apologize in any way for leaving the remainder of the sidereal universe to its unknown fate, and concentrating my attention mainly on the affairs of that solitary little, out-of-the-way second-rate system, whereof we form an inappreciable portion. ”

“ Tomorrow at nine hours the Shooting Star with a picked crew, with a staff of specialists and representatives from all the great corporations will blast off for Alpha Centauri.
"Under the directorship of John Villainowski of Government's Bureau of Research, the man who developed the stellar drive, the expedition plans to investigate the planetary systems of the Centaurian suns. ”

“ And the secret was out. Alpha Centauri would search for and, if possible, possess this man of her imagination, and forever bring damnation upon her soul. What woman is happy with the individual she thinks her affinity? ”

“ I'm told that the galaxy is a hell of a big place. You've about as much chance of getting there as you have of swimming the Pacific Ocean with one arm tied behind you. Scyth is gone from here so far that it takes light thousands of years to get that far. Hell, Dusty, at this moment, the best resources of all the science of the Earth and the so-called planetary income couldn't move a housebrick from here to Venus in less than a matter of months. Alpha Centauri is actually no more than a dreamer's symbol so far as we're concerned. ”

“ Our sun is too insignificant for us to think that he can make a conspicuous appearance among them, except, perhaps, in a few cases. As seen, for instance, from the nearest known star, Alpha Centauri, the sun would appear of the average first magnitude, and consequently from that standpoint he might be the gem of some little constellation which had no Sirius, or Arcturus, or Vega to eclipse him with its superior splendor. ”

“ SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE
The brighter of the two Pointers to the Cross, Alpha Centauri, ranks very high among first-magnitude stars, though it is excelled in brightness by Sirius and Canopus; but its greatest claim to our interest is that among all the host of stars it is our nearest neighbour. Yet, should we decide to pay a visit and travel with the speed of light (11 million miles a minute) , it would be four years and three months before we could reach our destination—so great are the spaces which separate our sun with his family of planets from the nearest of his brother suns. ”

“ If a planet equal in size to the “giant planet,” Jupiter, were revolving round the nearest star—Alpha Centauri—at the same distance from that star that Jupiter is from the sun, it would be utterly invisible in our largest telescopes. The invisibility of planets circling round the stars is therefore no proof whatever of their non-existence. Each star of the solar type may possibly be attended by a retinue of planets which may, perhaps, remain forever invisible in the largest telescopes which man can construct. We can, therefore, draw our conclusions only from analogy. ”

“ The total absence of one expected phenomenon puzzled the old man greatly, namely that the stars directly behind them, and especially the twin star, Alpha Centauri, from whose system they had come, did not turn gradually red and then disappear as the gradually increasing speed of the space-ship slowed down the apparent rate of vibration of light from the rear. ”

“ The networks of mass attractors that tethered the Extractor to Planet Pluto disengaged nine Earth centuries after construction began. Pluto contributed its orbital momentum to the launch. In time the integrated drives of the most advanced propulsion thrusters took on the full load, and the dream of humankind was on its way to the Alpha Centauri star system, on schedule.
Scientists and technicians on The Solar System's Slingshot Control Center maintained constant real-time oversight of the Extractor's subsystems and structures through spunnel monitors. ”

“ A perfectly huge city without a single inhabitant."
"What planet is this?" Villainowski asked suddenly.
"There's no harm in telling you, I suppose," said Ileth, "because we haven't the faintest notion. Our astronomer says that it belongs to Alpha Centauri A, although he hasn't figured its period yet. He says it's about midway between Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B. It's a little larger than Earth but not so dense. Gravity is about four fifths what it is at home." ”

“ Bruce, from a planet that circled about the star that we know as Alpha Centauri, a star that is the nearest of all our stellar neighbors, being only four and a third light [248] years distant. Their home planet was disrupted by a colossal engineering experiment of the Centaurians themselves, the only survivors being a group of fifty who escaped in a space ship just before the catastrophe.
"There were no other habitable planets in their own system, so in desperation these refugees sped out across the void to our solar system in the hope of finding a new home here. ”

“ Space had a new concept. Speed was something that advanced them. It was little more than a sensation until Alpha Centauri began to loom larger upon their screens. From their vantage point in Trans-Einsteinian space, it did not look like a star at all. It was two intertwined circular spirals of light, and at the intervals where the two coils met were little nodules of gold.
The crew was given instructions on the anticipated sensations that were to follow.
“It will be like plunging back from immortality to mortality,” Ato told Odin. “Over four years have passed, as light is measured. ”

“ That any of the lucent stars, the stars commonly so called, could collide with the Sun, or come near enough to amount to the same thing, is demonstrably impossible for æons of years. But this is far from the case for a dark star. Such a body might well be within a hundredth of the distance of the nearest of our known neighbors, Alpha Centauri, at the present moment without our being aware of it at all. Our senses could only be cognizant of its proximity by the borrowed light it reflected from our own Sun. Dark in itself, our own head-lights alone would show it up when close upon us. ”

“ The star we know as the nearest to us in the heavens, Alpha Centauri, is composed of two very bright partners, which take about eighty-seven years to traverse their orbit. They sometimes come as near to each other as Saturn is to the sun. In the case of Sirius astronomers found out that he had a companion by reason of his irregularities of movement before they discovered that companion, which is apparently a very small star, only to be discerned with good telescopes. ”

“ Our thoughts are transported from star to star, from system to system, from region to region, in the presence of unfathomable grandeurs, in sight of celestial motions whose speed we are but just beginning properly to value, but which already surpasses all conception. The [272] proper annual motion of the sun Alpha Centauri exceeds 188 millions of leagues per year. The proper motion of the 61st of Cygnus (second sun in the order of distances) is equivalent to 370 millions of leagues per year, or about one million of leagues per day. ”

“ Why I thus compute 1,000 millions of years of light’s radius is because it is possible with powerful telescopes to detect light coming that distance; and when we contemplate that our nearest star, Alpha Centauri, is twenty trillions of miles distant, and 61 Cygni more than twice as [Pg 37] far,—or seven year’s flight of light,—and that the Polar star is some fifty years of light’s flight removed from us; then, if all suns are no nearer to each other than these are to our sun, we are led to believe we may see light with our unaided vision that has been on its journey for a million years. ”