There's a star nearly 5 light-years from Earth. Stephen Hawking is sending a spacecraft to it

Stephen Hawking, Mark Zuckerberg and a group of tech and science giants want to send a tiny probe no bigger than an iPhone traveling at 100 million miles per hour to the nearest star.

This $100 million "Breakthrough Starshot" project is a "proof of concept" program designed to assess the feasibility of sending a tiny spacecraft out to Alpha Centauri by surfing on light beams.

Sails would be attached to the nanocraft that would catch the light from a ground-based light beam, thereby propelling it through the solar system and beyond. Read more...