On March 24, the magazine Nature published research that is the results of a research work titled “pentagonal photonic crystal mirrors, scalable light candles with improved acceleration through neural topology optimization.” An exciting title, as you can imagine, this also serves as an example of why you cannot give very scientific and specific titles to publications and you have to add a little spark.
This is obviously about light candles or what is popularly known as a solar candle, although a light candle can work with any type of light, for a candle the photons are all the same, it does not distinguish between photons from a laser for example or the photons that come from the sun, curiously the idea of traveling through space using solar sails is very old. The first to propose this method to travel through space was the astronomer Johannes Kepler in the 11th century and he did so by observing that the tail of the Comets always pointed in the opposite direction to the sun, so he deduced that the sun must somehow generate some kind of repulsive force.
A light sail works similar to a sail on a ship, it acts as a mirror, what it does is reflect the photons coming from the sun or a powerful laser, which generates a small impulse in the opposite direction, the point is that if the photons have no mass, you may wonder how they can push something, the answer is that they certainly have no mass, but they have linear momentum and when the photons hit a light sail, it transfers part of that moment to the sail, pushing it.
Unfortunately, at that moment that thrust is very small, if it were not like that, every time we left the house we would receive a slap from the sun's rays, which would be pushing us, hundreds of square meters of light sail are needed to propel a small probe, just a few kilos, to send a manned ship or for example to Mars or further away, a solar sail measuring square kilometers would be needed, which is why we seek to create sails with outrageous materials that are more efficient to achieve greater thrust.
What is news now is that thanks to the work of researchers from the northern laboratory of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and Brown University in the United States, they have developed a prototype of a light candle. What we see above is very small, it is 60 mm wide by 60 mm long, but the important thing is that its thickness is only 200 nanometers, that is a tiny fraction of what a human hair would be.
And the neural topology refers to the fact that the surface of that sail is intricately designed with billions of holes on a nanometer scale and this helps reduce the weight of the material and also increases its ability to reflect light, which provides greater thrust.
This would serve, for example, to travel to the stars, at least the closest ones in a reasonable time, the objective is to reach Proxima Centauri or Alpha Centauri, the Alpha Centauri system is made up of three stars, there are two main stars that are similar to the Sun by the way and there is a third that is Proxima Centauri that is much further away, what it does is orbit the other two and in fact some astronomers think that it will not do so for a long time, that it will end up leaving.
Proxima Centauri is the closest to us and has at least one rocky planet, but it is burned by the flares of that star, which is a red dwarf, so scientists welcome this idea and are working on it.
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