An astronomer has found a way to navigate interstellar travel

Interstellar travel may not be a problem that will directly concern humanity in the coming years, however Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are already out of the Solar System and will soon be followed by New Horizons. Traveling so far from Earth, communication with it is getting slower and longer, and there will come a time when communication due to distance will be impossible. It currently takes 28 hours for a signal to be sent from Earth to New Horizons and back. As you can see, if the navigation of interstellar vessels is based on their communication with the Earth, we are not talking about a very practical system.

In the paper available for peer review on arXiv, Bailer Jones, Institute for Astronomy, Germany, proposes a pulsars navigation system, using the dead star's periodic fluctuations as an intergalactic GPS. However even these signals can be distorted by interstellar vacuum over long distances. With a list of stars, Jones was able to prove that it was possible to find coordinates for the ship in six dimensions, three of space and three of speed, based on how the position of these stars changes from the position of the ship.

"When you travel to the nearest stars, the signals will be too weak and their transport times will take years. Thus, an interstellar vehicle must navigate autonomously and use information to decide whether to proceed with a course correction or when to activate certain instruments. Such a boat must be able to determine its position and speed using only the instruments at its disposal. As the spacecraft moves away from the Sun, the observable positions and velocities of the stars will change from what we find in the Earth's catalogs, due to parallax, deflection, and Doppler effect. By measuring the angular distances between pairs of stars and comparing them with the list, we can deduce the coordinates of the board through an iterative prediction process."