My telescope, set up for astrophotography in my light-polluted San Diego backyard, was pointed at a galaxy unfathomably far from Earth. My wife, Cristina, walked up just as the first space photo streamed to my tablet. It sparkled on the screen in front of us. “That’s the Pinwheel galaxy,” I said. The name is derived […]
Caltech’s Lightsail Experiment Brings Interstellar Travel Closer to Reality
A team of researchers at the California Institute of Technology devised a means of measuring the thin membranes of a lightsail, helping prove out a futuristic travel concept first imagined by Johannes Kepler over 400 years ago. The team’s research, published this month in Nature Photonics, describes a miniature lightsail in a laboratory setting. The […]