Centaurus

4.24 light years from the Sun is the nearest star of all.

Its name is Proxima Centauri, which simply means the nearest one in Centaurus.

It isn't much like the Sun.

Proxima is a red dwarf, a small, cool star with only about an eighth of the Sun's mass.

The reply.

Eh? Where from? Where from? The message was directed towards the constellation Centaurus.

That seems too fantastic to be true.

Arecibo's main target was the star Alpha Centauri.

If this is the case, then they would be the Milky Way's first known binary globular cluster pair.

We found binary clusters in other galaxies, like in Centaurus A and the Large Magellanic Cloud, but scientists think it might be when these gravitationally bound clusters collide that we get the most massive globular clusters, like Omega Centauri.

So studying a binary cluster right in our own galaxy could produce some amazing insights into this process.

It's all speculation at the moment, but it's definitely cool to think about.

Nuclear physicist Anton Wallner, who led one of these research teams studying the deposits, said that the fact that the more recent debris was spread across 1.5 million years suggests that there were a series of supernovae that occurred one after another in close succession.

Astrophysicist Dieter Breitschaft, who led a second team of scientists, identified a likely source of these supernova explosions, which would have occurred 196 to 423 light years from the sun.

These supernovae that created our local hot bubble may have been part of an aging star cluster, whose surviving members are now associated with the Scorpius-Centaurus stellar group.

Using the iron-60 deposits, the team was able to trace the signals of two supernovae, one that happened 1.5 million years ago, and the other 2.3 million years ago, as the result of the deaths of stars that were 8.8 times and 9.2 times the mass of our sun respectively.

And you don't need to have heard the main episodes first, although it helps to know the basic geography.

Centaurus is the centaur, Lupus is the animal he carries, Ara is the altar below them, and Sagittarius is the archer to the east.

Together they occupy one of the richest stretches of the southern sky.

The Greeks turned part of it into something resembling a ritual scene, a centaur carrying an animal toward an altar.

But other cultures looked toward those same regions of sky and found very different stories, some considerably darker, some considerably stranger, and one involving a fight that starts over a boar and ends with a god handing over one of the most destructive weapons imaginable.

We'll take them one constellation at a time.

First, Centaurus.

Long before the Greeks put a centaur here, Babylonian astronomers placed something very different among these stars.