Nano-Starship Being Developed to Travel 20 Percent the Speed of Light

Space exploration has made major strides in the past century, bringing our understanding of far distant places closer to home. Recently at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) along with renowned scientist Stephen Hawking, introduced their plan to build a nano-starship that can travel 20 percent (one fifth) of the speed of light. The nano-starship, given the name ‘Star-Chip’ due to its small size which is comparable to the size of a postage stamp, will utilize lasers to explore interstellar space and be propelled to our nearest star system, Alpha Centauri.



“The limit that confronts us now is the great void between us and the stars. But now we can transcend it. With light beams, light sails, and the lightest spacecraft ever built, we can launch a mission to Alpha Centauri within a generation,” said Hawking at the original project unveiling. “Today, we commit to this next great leap into the cosmos because we are human, and our nature is to fly.”

If the trip is successful the projected amount of time it would take StarChip to reach Alpha Centauri would be about 20 years. The amount of time needed to reach Alpha Centauri is an obstacle to many of the project researchers, being that the amount of radiation the spacecraft will encounter in space is more than enough to destroy it.



A possible solution that will not double or triple the length of the voyage while also sustaining the ship would be chip self-healing. By utilizing a 'gate-all-around' nanowire transistor, an electric current would be able to heat the chip contained within Star-Chip and therefore heal any damage incurred through exposure to radiation.

“On-chip healing has been around for many, many years,” said Jin-Woo Han, one of the NASA team members.

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Incredible!! It Is a reality to create matter from light

Last year, scientists were collaborating to create matter from light. Finally, they have turned this investigation into a reality, and the next step will be to develop the infinitive-energy source.

It is well known around the scientific community that matter and energy are one in the same, but are presented differently. Physicists at the Imperial College of London are attempting to do what was once thought impossible. Scientists had already knew that turning light and energy into matter was a possibility.

However, researchers and scientists thought it would be too difficult a task to create an environment to perform the conversion.

“By using high powered lasers and other modern equipment, we are on the cusp of achieving that end.”

The idea was originated in 1934, and fashioned by American Physicists Grogory Breit and John Wheeler.

Wheeler and Breit reasoned that, on rare occasions, when two photons combine and create an electron and its antimatter counterpart, a positron. Electrons are particles of matter that form the outer shell or cloud of atoms in everyday matter.

Oliver Pike, the lead researcher of the study said:

”The Breit-Wheeler process is the simplest way matter can be made from light and one of the purest demonstrations of E=mc2.”

The entire process starts with electrons and a slab of gold that is used to produce a beam of high energy photons.



Subsequently, the team takes a powerful laser and focuses on a tiny gold capsule known as a ‘hohlraum’. Hohlraum is a German word that means empty room. This creates light that is as bright as the stars. Lastly, they take the initial photon beams and project them into the hohlraum, where the two streams then collide and interact.

This process creates enough energy in a small enough area to create around 100,000 electron-positron pairs. This form of experiment falls neatly into the theories of quantum electrodynamics (QED) – a branch of physics that deals with the effects arising from the interactions of electric currents with magnets, currents, or with themselves.

The demonstration is posed to occur within the following months. A successful demonstration will encourage physicists who have been fantasizing about using a photon-photon collider to study how subatomic particles behave. The Director of the John Adams Institute at Oxford University even said:

“It’s breathtaking to think that things we thought are not connected can in fact be converted to each other: matter and energy, particles and light. Would we be able in the future to convert energy into time and vice versa?”



Just to be clear, this is only a discussion about the creation of very small aspects of matter. It isn’t as if we will be seeing solar rays being converted into couches or tee-shirts anytime soon.

That is why the implications are the truly exciting part of this theory. We will soon be able to quantify how much matter, light, and energy are the same.

Source: Jeff Wilson

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