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Talking about a revolution
Hindustan Times Ranchi
|October 12, 2025
Astrophysicists are uncovering planets that echo worlds from the works of James Cameron, Andy Weir and George Lucas. Take a look.
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James Cameron's Avatar (2009) is set on Pandora, a lush, habitable and fictional moon that orbits a gas giant in the very real Alpha Centauri A, which is part of a triple-star system 4.3 light years away from Earth.
This August, NASA astronomers peering through the James Webb Space Telescope found that a gas giant about the size of Saturn does indeed orbit Alpha Centauri A.
Because of its proximity, and the fact that we recognised it as a binary star system as far back as the 1600s, Alpha Centauri has featured prominently in science-fiction.
In Isaac Asimov short stories of the 1940s, humans use hyperspace or faster-than-light travel to get to Alpha Centauri. In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979), an intergalactic bureaucratic office is stationed there.
This story is from the October 12, 2025 edition of Hindustan Times Ranchi.
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