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Solar Sails and Comet Tails: How Sunlight Pushes Stuff Around
It seems crazy, but light actually exerts a physical force on objects. It could power a new generation of spacecraft for deep-space missions.
Now, to really go somewhere, you'd need a much bigger sail, and a NASA effort to build one spanning 1,650 square meters was abandoned in 2022 as infeasible, given the budget. But now that the proton is moving up and the magnetic field is pointing out of the page, this will exert a force in—wait for it—the same direction the EM wave is traveling, to the right. Hopefully the tiny solar force on pieces of dust will push for a long enough time to create a big, beautiful tail.
Or read this on Wired