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The closest star system to the Earth is the famous Alpha Centauri group. Located in the constellation of Centaurus (The Centaur), at a distance of 4.3 light-years, this system is made up of the binary formed by the stars Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B, plus the faint red dwarf Alpha Centauri C, also known as Proxima Centauri.
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has given us this stunning view of the bright Alpha Centauri A (on the left) and Alpha Centauri B (on the right), flashing like huge cosmic headlamps in the dark. The image was captured by the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). WFPC2 was Hubble's most used instrument for the first 13 years of the space telescope's life, being replaced in 2009 by WFC3 during Servicing Mission 4. This portrait of Alpha Centauri was produced by observations carried out at optical and near-infrared wavelengths.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Jiro on Tuesday September 06 2016, @09:11PM
All the stars in the list are either
1) Viewed with the CHARA Array, which is a scientific breakthrough for such images, or
2) Very large in angular diameter as visible from the Earth
Alpha Centauri falls in neither of those categories.
If you think that that picture has resolved Alpha Centauri as more than a blurred point of light, I'd have to see a source. The original article doesn't claim this and only uses the vague term "best image", (and only in the headline).
Also, a simple back of the envelope calculation shows that Alpha Centauri was not resolved. The size of Betelgeuse is 50 mas according to the list. The Wikipedia article for Betelgeuse shows a picture that is at most 10 pixels across (and even then, don't assume that each square in the image is actually a pixel). This means that a star would have to be at least 10 mas to be 2 pixels across using Hubble. Wikipedia's article for "angular diameter" lists it as being 7 mas.