By peering deep inside Orion's star-forming gas clouds, radio astronomers have been able to directly measure the masses of young binary stars, confirming that our theoretical models are on the right lines.
Alpha Centauri is the nearest star system to our own, sitting just over four light years away and it’s fascinated astronomers and storytellers alike for generations. With conventional rockets, reaching it would take hundreds of thousands of years, even for the Orion spacecraft it would take around 100,000 years. But a team of researchers at Texas A&M University think they may have taken the first tentative step towards a technology that could get us there in just twenty years.
