• Question: will space travel to another solar system be possible in the next 30 years?

    Asked by lou96 to Charlie, Eoin, Jemma, Julian, Steve on 22 Mar 2011.
    • Photo: Stephen Moss

      Stephen Moss answered on 21 Mar 2011:

      Hi Lou
      Unfortunately not. Even getting to the edge of our own solar system would take years and years, and the next nearest solar system is light years away. It would be so interesting if we could do it, but I think we’ll all be stuck on our little planet for ever.

    • Photo: Eoin Lettice

      Eoin Lettice answered on 21 Mar 2011:

      Hi lou96,
      I just don’t know enough about spacetravel to be able to give an accurate answer to this one!
      I think space travel within this solar system is far from perfected, so perhaps we should concentrate on that first!

      Eoin

    • Photo: Charlie Ryan

      Charlie Ryan answered on 21 Mar 2011:

      hi lou96 again!
      Great question – right up my street!
      Sadly i think the question is no. The distances between stars is so great that it is really, really difficult to travel between them.
      Voyager 1, a space probe launched in 1977 is the furthest human made object from earth, at about 19 billion kilometres. But the nearest star to the sun, proxima centauri, is 39.7 million billion km’s away! So voyager has travelled a ten millionth of the distance to the nearest star in 33 years!! (and thats assuming its going the right direction).
      There have been various projects to design interstellar spacecraft but they have all been on the drawing board, and never got anywhere near being tested! One of the most famous is the british designed project daedalus, which was meant to use a type of fusion to get to propel it. Sadly this fusion egine has never been made to work!! Also the spacecraft was about the size of the empire state building!!

    • Photo: Julian Rayner

      Julian Rayner answered on 22 Mar 2011:

      Hi lou96. Charlie is the person who will really know the answer to this, but my guess is no. Distances in space are far bigger than our minds tend to comprehend easily. The nearest star to the sun is about 4 light years away, which means it takes light 4 years to get to us from there. We can’t travel anywhere near the speed of light, so it would take us much much longer to get there, even if we left now… So we better learn how to take good care of our own solar system, because we are going to be stuck in it for a while!

Comments