NASA
Travel just 4.37 light years away from our planet (in the correct direction, of course), and you’ll come into contact with our closest neighboring star system, Alpha Centauri.
Unlike our own solar system, which orbits one star (the Sun), Alpha Centauri is a triple star system meaning that it has – you guessed it – three stars in total.
At the centre is the binary pair Alpha Centauri A and B, with the third star – Proxima Centauri – a red dwarf that orbits them.
Though Alpha Centauri is close (in space terms at least) we’ve never visited. But thanks to engineers at Texas A&M university, that could be about to change.
NASA
Why haven’t we visited? Well because, though our rockets that we use to explore our own system are fast, it would taken them hundreds of thousands of years to reach the nearby star system.
In order to get there more quickly, new technology is required – and that could just be the light-driven motion approach developed by the engineers, which their recent paper (published in the journal Newton) suggests could reduce travel time to Alpha Centauri to around twenty years.
The technology uses tiny devices known as ‘metajets’ which use light to create momentum.
This means that they could use the power of light to create the force to propel a spacecraft out of our solar system and into our neighboring star system, so long as enough light is provided to the metajets.
ESA/Hubble
Though the current devices tested are minute, the researchers believe that they would be able to scale up the project so long as they could also scale up the amount of light, since the quantity of optical power determines the propulsion, rather than the size of the object being moved.
Sure, they might have only tested the technology on a small scale so far, but the optical propulsion has been tested within fluid (to account for the effects of gravity) and will soon be studied in a microgravity environment.
If proven successful when scaled up, the ability to use light instead of fuel to move objects of all different sizes could be a significant breakthrough – especially if it helps us travel further, faster.
After all, we’re all keen to know what’s out there.
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