Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 24, 2025
The nearest to us of all the stars is that known as Alpha Centauri. Its distance is computed at 25,000,000,000,000 miles, which in our notation reads twenty-five trillion miles. It takes light over four years to traverse this distance.
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.
It would take the "Empire State Express," never stopping night or day and going at the rate of a mile a minute, almost 50,000,000 years to travel from the earth to this star. The next of the fixed stars and the brightest in all the heavens is that which we call Sirius or the Dog Star. It is double the distance of Alpha Centauri, that is, it is eight "light years" away.
Rip centered the top of the instrument's vertical hairline on Alpha Centauri, then waited until Koa was almost out of sight over the asteroid's horizon, which was only a few hundred yards away. He turned up the volume on his helmet communicator. "Koa, move about ten feet to your left." Koa did so. Rip sighted past the vertical hairline at the belt light. "That's a little too far.
The surface of the second sphere will be twelve light-years away, that of the third eighteen, etc. The volumes of space within each of these spheres will be as the cubes of the diameters. The most likely conclusion we can draw from measures of parallax is that the first sphere will contain, beside the sun at its centre, only Alpha Centauri.
Within the hour the flaming jets of the Valhalla's planetary drive had lifted the great ship from Earth. They had left immediately for Alpha Centauri, four and a half light-years away. The round trip had taken the Valhalla just six weeks. During those six weeks, better than nine years had passed on Earth. Alan Donnell was seventeen years old. His twin brother Steve was now twenty-six.
To use the old familiar illustration of the express train, it would take the "Twentieth Century Limited," which does the thousand mile trip between New York and Chicago in less than twenty-four hours, some one million two hundred and fifty thousand years at the same speed to travel from the earth to Alpha Centauri.
The Valhalla was on the return leg of a journey to Alpha Centauri. But one man aboard the starship had not waited for the morning alarm. For Alan Donnell the day had begun several hours before.
Then he continued: "This is an important mission one which I hope will enable the Solar Guard to establish the first base outside of our solar system. Our destination is Tara, in the star system of Alpha Centauri. Tara is a planet in a stage of development similar to that of Earth several million years ago. Its climate is tropical, and lush vegetation jungles really covers the land surface.
"It amounts to sixty-three thousand times the distance from here to the sun!" Smith whistled. "Nothing doing in the cube, that's sure. Besides, could we expect to find any people like us in the neighborhood of that star?" "Not Alpha Centauri." The doctor reached for one of the Venusian books, and pointed out certain pages.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking