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By Andrew
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Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner launch $100m star voyage

Project to aim for sending a featherweight robotic spacecraft to the nearest star at one-fifth of the speed of light.

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Yuri Milner, Stephen Hawking Offer Up $100M for Alien Life Search

In an unprecedented boost for interstellar travel, the Silicon Valley philanthropist Yuri Milner and the world’s most famous cosmologist Stephen Hawking have announced $100m (£70m) for research into a 20-year voyage to the nearest stars, at one fifth of the speed of light.

Breakthrough Starshot – the third Breakthrough initiative in the past four years – will test the know-how and technologies necessary to send a featherweight robot spacecraft to the Alpha Centauri star system, at a distance of 4.37 light years: that is, 40,000,000,000,000 kilometres or 25 trillion miles.

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This artist's impression shows the planet orbiting the star Alpha Centauri B, a member of the triple star system that is the closest to Earth.

A 100 billion-watt laser-powered light beam would accelerate a “nanocraft” – something weighing little more than a sheet of paper and driven by a sail not much bigger than a child’s kite, fashioned from fabric only a few hundred atoms in thickness – to the three nearest stars at 60,000km a second.

Click here to read the whole article.

Source: The Guardian