Researchers have predicted that an interstellar probe fleet – travelling at 10 percent of speed of light – could survey the entire Milky Way galaxy in 10 million years.
University of Edinburgh researchers, Arwen Nicholson and Duncan Forgan’s computer simulations showed that the probes could get a turbo-boost and could save fuel by doing a slingshot off the stars’ gravitational fields, Discovery News reported.
In their recent paper, the researchers explored 3 scenarios of behaviour of a probe, the first one was that a probe uses standard powered flight, another scenario was that a probe uses gravitational slingshot techniques around stars, and third was hop scotching star-by-star to get the greatest speed boost under trajectories of slingshot.
The simulations also suggest that our solar system may have been visited – probably more than once – well-before human beings walked the Earth.
ANI