Alpha Centauri is the nearest star system to our own, sitting just over four light years away and it’s fascinated astronomers and storytellers alike for generations. With conventional rockets, reaching it would take hundreds of thousands of years, even for the Orion spacecraft it would take around 100,000 years. But a team of researchers at Texas A&M University think they may have taken the first tentative step towards a technology that could get us there in just twenty years. Their secret……is to use light itself. This image of the sky around the bright star Alpha Centauri AB also shows the much fainter red dwarf star, Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Solar System and maybe the destination for our first interstellar craft driven by light propulsion (Credit : Digitised Sky Survey 2) The idea that light can push things isn’t new.…