Alpha Centauri System

Alpha Centauri, the brightest "star" in the constellation of Centaurus is, when seen through a telescope, actually three stars orbiting around one another. This trinary star system consists of a yellow dwarf, Alpha Centauri A, also known as Rigil Kentaurus, an orange dwarf, Alpha Centauri B, also known as Toliman, and a red dwarf, Alpha Centauri C, also known as Proxima Centauri.
Its distance from Earth is approximately 4.37 light years, making it the closest star system in the galaxy to the Solar System as well as the third brightest star in Earth's night sky.List of brightest stars in Wikipedia
==Stars==
Alpha Centauri is a trinary star system, meaning that it has three stars. It is Earth's closest stellar neighbor outside the solar system.
Its largest member, Alpha Centauri A , (or "ACA" to astronomers), is about 20% larger than the sun, but otherwise very similar. ACA would be otherwise unremarkable were it not for the fact that it serves as the sun for Pandora, a large moon that orbits the gas giant Polyphemus. It was on Pandora that explorers encountered the Na'vi, the only intelligent species yet discovered in outer space. Pandora is also the only known source for unobtanium, a high temperature superconductor essential for many of Earth's technologies.
Alpha Centauri B is about fifteen percent smaller than the sun, and noticeably orange because it is 500 kelvins cooler than its neighboring star.
Alpha Centauri C, also known as Proxima Centauri, is a red dwarf, being only twenty percent of the size of the Sun and less than half its temperature. Proxima gives off only a dim red glow instead of the bright yellow glare of the Sun and ACA. Proxima Centauri is also about 0.13 light-years closer to Earth.
==Planetary Bodies==
The three gas giant planets orbiting Alpha Centauri B were discovered by terrestrial observatories. The five rocky planets were discovered two decades later. Since the arrangement of the planets resembled our own solar system, they were named for their counterparts: Vulcan (inside Mercury's orbit), Hermes (Mercury), Aphrodite (Venus), Gaea (Earth), Ares (Mars), Zeus (Jupiter), Cronus (Saturn), and Poseidon (chosen instead of another name for Uranus, because it occupies the equivalent of Neptune's orbit).
Two inner rocky planets and three outer gas giants are orbiting ACA.Alpha Centauri A in Avatar: The Exhibition The three gas giants around ACA were not found until after the co-orbiting synchronized telescopic interferometer network (COSTIN) went into full operation. Upon their discovery, they were named Oceanus, Coeus, and Crius. Coeus was later renamed, or perhaps nicknamed, Polyphemus.
Three planets orbit Alpha Centauri C: a close-in gas giant and two rocky planets.The Science of Avatar (Stephen Baxter, 2012)
==Location==
The astronomical coordinates for the Centaurus star system are right ascension 14h 39.6m; declination -60 degrees 50'. Alpha Centauri A and B are located approximately 4.37 light years or 277,600 Astronomical units from Earth (one AU is the average distance of Earth from the Sun, about 93,000,000 miles or 149.6 Gm). Alpha Centauri C (also called "Proxima Centauri" because it is the closest of the three stars to Earth) is about 0.13 light-years closer.
== Discovery ==
In December of 1689, Jean Richaud first discovered Alpha Centauri A along with Alpha Centauri B while observing a comet from his station in Puducherry. He was the first to recognize the two stars’ binary nature. This was not the first binary system discovered, as Acrux was discovered to be a binary system prior to Alpha Centauri.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Centauri
==Source==
* James Cameron's Avatar: The Game - Ingame Pandorapedia
==References==
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