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Updated: May 24, 2025
The sun's light flashes to the earth in eight minutes, and to Neptune in about three and a half hours, but it requires three and a half years to signal Alpha Centauri. And as for the great majority of the stars, had they been blotted out of existence before the Christian era, we of to-day should still receive their light and seem to see them just as we do.
Psychophysiology was in an uproar over my success. "Man can now be all protoplast," some said. Others as vehemently insisted some tiny but tangible chromosome-organ link to the past must remain. For my part it all sounded very academic; I was well again. There was one unhappy moment when I applied for the new Centauri Expedition. "Too much of a risk," the Consulting Board told me.
This is equal to the product of 186,000 miles, the distance travelled in one second, by 31,558,000, the number of seconds in a year. The reader who chooses to do so may perform the multiplication for himself. The product will amount to about 63,000 times the distance of the sun. The nearest star whose distance we know, Alpha Centauri, is distant from us more than four light-years.
It follows that if we can imagine a gigantic pair of compasses, of which the points extend from us to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star, we should have to measure out at least five hundred spaces with the compass, and perhaps even one thousand or more, to reach the region of the Milky Way. With this we have to connect another curious fact.
We can hardly say that the parallaxes of more than one hundred stars have been measured with any approach to certainty. The individuals of this one hundred are situated at very different distances from us. We hope, by long and repeated observations, to make a fairly approximate determination of the parallaxes of all the stars whose distance is less than twenty times that of a Centauri.
Here and there amongst them we find luminous patches or 'nebulæ, which prove to be either clusters of stars or stupendous clouds of glowing gases. Our sun is a solitary blue star on the verge of the Milky Way, 20 billion miles from Alpha Centauri his next-door neighbour.
On November 30, accordingly, he telegraphed to Mr. Pogson, the Madras astronomer, "Biela touched earth November 27; search near Theta Centauri" the "anti-radiant," as it is called, being situated close to that star. Bad weather prohibited observation during thirty-six hours, but when the rain clouds broke on the morning of December 2, there a comet was, just in the indicated position.
Pelion, and other mountains in this part of Greece, abounding in wild bulls, these ferocious animals were frequently hunted by the people of the country on horseback, and when overtaken were seized by their pursuers, who caught hold of them by the horns, in a manner not less dexterous than daring. Hence, these hunters acquired the name of Centauri and Hippocentauri.
Koa detailed men to load the nuclear bombs into the landing craft, left Pederson to supervise, and then brought Santos with him to help Rip. "The bombs are being put on the boat, sir," Koa reported. "Fine. There isn’t too much chance of the blasts setting them off, but we’ll take no chances at all. Koa, I’m going to shoot a line straight out toward Alpha Centauri.
Sir David Gill's definitive results were published in 1900. As the average parallax of the eleven brightest stars in the southern hemisphere, they gave 0·13", a value enhanced by the exceptional proximity of Alpha Centauri. Yet four of these conspicuous objects Canopus, Rigel, Spica, and Beta Crucis gave no sign of perspective response to the annual change in our point of view.
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