Famed physicist Stephen Hawking and tech billionaire Yuri Milner just announced a radical plan to send tiny, blazingly fast space ships to the nearest star system to our own, Alpha Centauri.
The core concept of the project, called Breakthrough Starshot, is to shoot powerful lasers at thousands of palm-size "nanocraft" equipped with light sails.
This should propel the small robots upwards of 20% the speed of light, helping them reach our neighboring star (which is about 25 trillion miles away) in a couple of decades.
Here's how these tiny celestial sailboats might work.
The plan involves tiny, mass-produced nanocraft that should cost about as much as an iPhone.
Within the nanocraft will be a StarChip, a "gram-scale wafer" the carries all the necessary equipment — thrusters, power supply, communications, a camera, and more — the spaceship needs to explore deep space.
The tiny ships will be propelled by an array of powerful lasers back on Earth, called the "light beamer."
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