Fredagskollokvium: Voyage to Alpha Centauri

StarShot is a visionary, audacious, and frankly pretty crazy, project dreamed up by the Breakthrough Initiatives Foundation, brainchild of Russian billionaire philanthropist, and former physicist, Yuri Milner.  StarShot aims to laser-launch a swarm of credit-card-sized nanobots (“StarShot Troopers”) on photon sails to fly at 0.2c to the nearby Alpha Centauri system and send back close-up images of potentially habitable planets, before the end of this century.  I will describe the StarShot strategy as an inevitable consequence of the mechanics of interstellar spaceflight, in particular the “tyranny of the rocket equation.”  I will mention a few of the most obvious of the extremely daunting technical challenges facing this daring scheme, but also will describe in some detail the proposed target of the project – the triple star system Alpha Centauri – including the StarShot-supported on-going intensive search for potentially habitable planets around the two solar-like stars in the central binary.  The distant third member – Proxima, accidentally nearest to the Sun – is a dim red dwarf whose habitable zone is so close to the star (0.1 AU) that ground-based searches for potentially life-bearing exoplanets are unlikely to succeed in the two decades before the proposed StarShot launch.