Technology

Minuscule silicon wafers propelled by lasers could be used to steer light sails, helping them travel beyond the solar system

Facebook / Meta Twitter / X icon Linkedin Reddit Email

An artist’s impression of a light sail

RICHARD BIZLEY/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Interstellar travel propelled by light just got one step closer. Light sails , which are huge sheets pushed along by light that bounces off of them, may be the best way to travel enormous distances through space, and now we may have a way to steer them.

“We knew already that any light or laser can impart momentum transfer, but now we can control the direction as well,” says Kaushik Kudtarkar at Texas A&M University. He and his colleagues created a tiny device called a metajet that uses refraction of light, not just reflection, to move in more than one direction at once.

The device is a material called a metasurface , an extremely thin sheet textured to manipulate light.…