When you prepare to plan a journey, you definitely have to know how long the trip will take.
Some physicists have tried to calculate the exact time it would take us to reach other star systems in our galaxy, with currently available spacecraft technology.
They looked specifically at the four unmanned space probes that NASA launched into space (Pioneer 10 and 11, Voyager 1 and 2), and the data they obtained will tell us what humans will lose.
We will have to wait thousands of years for probes to see a star system and send data back;
To come to this conclusion, Coryn Bailer-Jones from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany and Davide Farnocchia from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, studied the latest data from the Gaia space observatory.
Gaia’s latest updated map has the locations of about 7.2 million stars.
The results show that, in the next million years, these four probes will likely `encounter` about 60 stars.
To make it easier to imagine, let’s look at the distance from Earth to Pluto (the outermost planet of the Solar System): just over 7 billion km.
Pioneer 10 is the first to reach its destination: it is expected to encounter the dwarf star `HIP 117795` in the constellation of Cassiopeia, which is of course 90,000 years in the future.
Future space missions, in fact, won’t necessarily follow the path of these four probes – our closest star system, Alpha Centauri, is only about 4.37 light years away, or 1,
Although scientists’ calculations are not exact numbers in the future, because our technology is developing rapidly, it does show the great scale of the galaxy (not to mention the entire galaxy).
It may take us generations to reach the nearest stars, at least until scientists figure out how to develop the `Warp Drive` — a researched teleportation engine.
Some experts actually think that maybe one day we’ll be able to travel at the speed of light (and reach Alpha Centauri in four years or so), but this is purely theoretical until now.
Currently, this research has not yet been peer-reviewed, you can check it out in advance on arXiv.org.
According to SciecenAlert