Starshot Project: Stephen Hawking and Mark Zuckerberg launch most ambitious alien-finding project ever!

The backers hope that the project can send tiny rockets  25 trillion miles into space in just 20 years – and send back pictures, potentially showing worlds that could support life.

Tiny rockets are going to be sent into space to study the far universe in the most ambitious space exploration project in history.

Scientists including Stephen Hawking and backers such as internet investor Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg will send “nano craft” deep into space to explore the most remote regions that humans have ever seen, by far.

The hugely ambitious project could reveal deep secrets of the universe and will allow people to photograph one of the most likely places to hold life on other worlds.

Professor Hawking said at the event: "What makes us unique is transcending our limits. Gravity pins us to the ground, but I just flew to America.

"How do we transcend these limits? With our minds and our machines.

"The limit that confronts us now is the great void between us and the stars. But now we can transcend it, with light beams, light sails, and the lightest spacecraft ever built. Today we commit to this next great leap into the cosmos, because we are human and our nature is to fly.”

The Starshot Project hopes to get the tiny robots out to the Alpha Centauri star system, 25 trillion miles away. Getting there through normal means would take 30,000 years – but the new project hopes that using the tiny rockets will allow them to get there in just 20.