A new study examines how much material from the closest star system to Earth will end up in orbit around the Sun, and how ...

Oumuamua and Comet Borisov in 2017 and 2019, respectively, created a surge of interest. What were they? Where did they come ...

Sailing has been a mainstay of human history for millennia, so it's no surprise that scientists would apply it to traveling ...

Breakthrough Starshot focuses on a tiny design with gigantic solar "wings" that would allow them to ride a beam of light to Alpha Centauri. However, for practical purposes, a probe that small will ...

It would then take them just 20 years to travel to the Alpha Centauri star system four light years away, but they would have extremely little time to explore the system –. It is not possible for ...

Nebulae are gigantic clouds of gas and dust that exist in space between stars. Check out 7 mesmerizing photos of this cosmic ...

Our space-exploration ambitions have boldly taken humans to the moon, rovers to Mars and spacecraft to the outer reaches of ...

But Alpha Centauri is about 4.3 light-years, or 25 trillion miles, from Earth. It would take a spacecraft over 25,000 years—more than 300 lifetimes of an astronomer—to reach it. When ...

"Chemical rockets that we use today, even with the extra speed boost from flying by planets, or from swinging by the sun for a boost, just don't have the ability to scale to useful interstellar speeds ...

"The lightsail will travel faster than any previous spacecraft, with potential to eventually open interstellar distances to ...