distances and time. Without a doubt, the great enemies of space exploration and travel undertaken by the NASA, ESA and the rest of the agencies that are dedicated to astronomy. The separation between the celestial bodies is so great that not even the speed of light is used to travel the entire universe.
To give us an idea, the closest galaxy to the Milky Way is Andromeda. And it is about 2,537 million light years away. That is to say that if we manage to decipher said speed, it would take us that amount of time to arrive.
Although the reality is that finding the speed of light stands as the first step to at least get out of the Solar System quickly and explore our immediate surroundings. Voyaguer 1 and 2 are pioneers in this type of research.
They were launched in the late 1970s and have traveled between 132 and 159 Astronomical Units (AU, distance between the Earth and the Sun). It is an achievement of science and a milestone to be noted, but it has already become obsolete. There is a method that is being studied, which is beginning to emerge as one of the greatest advances in speed in space.
A method that claims to approach the speed of light
The method is a proposal by scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). They pretend that the spaceships that use it can travel 30 AU per year. In other words, in just 5 years they would equal the distance of Voyager, which is further away.
according to review xatakathe study plans to use something called a pellet beam with hypervelocity microscopic particles that reach 120 kilometers per second.
In Spanish: it is a kind of solar panel, which with the energetic rays of the massive star feeds a beam of pellets that shoots lasers towards a mechanism that works like the sails of ships and thus pushes the ship towards the orbits, which also they would serve as an impulse for the apparatus.
Artur Davoyan, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UCLA, says there are two problems to solve: the first is that it cannot be applied to vehicles with very heavy loads (half a ton is ideal) and that the fact that it works with solar rays, it limits the fact that its greatest momentum will be lost when it gets too far away from the massive star.
