Last year, Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner hatched an ambitious plan to send a tiny probe to the Alpha Centauri star system. Travelling at 20 per cent the speed of light, the researchers weren't entirely sure how the probe was supposed to stop once it arrived at its destination, or whether it would even be able to. Excitingly, a pair of European scientists now say they have solved the problem.
In a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, physicist René Heller from the Max Planck Institute, along with computer scientist Michael Hippke, has shown that the radiation and gravity from Alpha Centauri's stars can be used to decelerate an incoming probe. So instead of whizzing by in a flash, the lightsail-driven nanocraft will hit the brakes, slowing down enough to explore the system's trio of stars — and even the Earth-like planet Proxima b.