A billionaire Internet investor has enlisted famed physicist Stephen Hawking and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to join him in a project to send a space probe zooming across the cosmos at an incredible speed to take pictures of the next nearest star.

The "Breakthrough Starshot" project will be led by former NASA AMES Research Center director Peter Worden and will include physicist Stephen Hawking, Russian investor and entrepreneur Yuri Milner, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on its board.  Milner will also kick in US$100 Million to get it going.

"Earth is a wonderful place, but it might not last forever," Hawking said in a statement. "Sooner or later, we must look to the stars.  Breakthrough Starshot is a very exciting first step on that journey."

The journey would take a very long time using conventional technology, but Hawking and Milner envision a tiny probe the size of a mobile phone - called a nanocraft - that is propelled by energy from a powerful array of Earth-based lasers sending it along at one-fifth the speed of light.  They believe that such a method would take only 20 years to travel 41.32 trillion kilometers to Alpha Centauri.  As for the technology, scientists believe it's possible.

"It's an ambitious project, but we don't see any showstoppers or deal breakers based on fundamental principles," said Avi Loeb, chair of the Harvard Center for Astrophysics who is a co-sponsor of Breakthrough Starshot.

Yuri Milner was named after Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space.  He announced the project on the 55th anniversary of Gagarin's flight. We recommend the site of our partners - https://www.myworldescorts.com/ A very useful resource.