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

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 ...

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

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 ...

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

Only the three-star Alpha Centauri star system, which is 4.1 light-years distant, is closer. In 2016, astronomers found a planet orbiting the nearest star to Earth in this system, called Proxima ...

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

"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 ...

Powered by laser light, this tiny sail lays the groundwork for future advances in lightsail technology and the potential for ...

The nearest visible star system is Alpha Centauri, which is about 4.25 light-years away. The closest star in this three-star system is Proxima Centauri, but because it's a red dwarf, it's too dim ...

PhotoPhoto of the Sun in hydrogen-alpha light. The giant planet Jupiter ... Its distance is 1500 light years, meaning that the light we see from it left more than a thousand years before the ...

The project hopes to propel roughly 1,000 tiny "StarChip" spacecraft toward Alpha Centauri, the second-closest ... Smart aliens might live within 33,000 light-years of Earth.