The Nearest Strangers: Alpha Centauri and the Limits of Knowing

By: Kriger, Boris

Three stars live next door. The nearest of them is a small red dwarf you cannot see without a telescope; the other two, a near-copy of our Sun and its smaller orange partner, blend into a single brilliant point in the southern sky, the foot of the Centaur. They are the most closely watched stars beyond the Sun. Astronomers can tell you their masses to three decimal places, when the two bright ones will next swing close to each other, and how old they are to within a few hundred million years. Ask whether a single planet circles either of the Sun-like pair, and the honest answer is still: nobody knows.
The Nearest Strangers is a book about that gap. It follows the people who measured these stars, sometimes too early to believe their own results, and the planets that were announced, argued over, retracted, and in one case photographed once before slipping out of sight. It explains why the closest system in the sky is among the hardest to study, why a supernova there is impossible, why a trip there may never be worth making, and what lies far beyond it in the same direction.
Boris Kriger brings his own research to the table without false modesty, including a principle for measuring how much of a planetary system our instruments are simply blind to, and one of his own methods, together with the referee's verdict that sank it. The result is a warm, mischievous and scrupulously honest portrait of our neighbors, and of the difference between being close to something and knowing it.
Keywords: astronomy; exoplanets; stars; space exploration; history of science; astrobiology; cosmology

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HLCH9M7M
• ISBN13: 9798177757247
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 354 Pages
• Weight: 1.04 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"