Simulated observation at 160 μm of α Cen AB, assuming a face-on circumbinary dust disc/ring (, cf. Sect. 4.5.2). As seen from the system’s barycentre (white rectangle), the ring extends from 70 to 105 AU. (The white arrow has a length of 80 AU.) In this image, each pixel is on a side. The image was smoothed with a 16 × 16 pixel Gaussian filter with a standard deviation of 3 pixels. The added noise is also Gaussian-distributed and smoothed to mimic the noise and beam size of Fig. 2.