Watch live online: Stephen Hawking to announce mystery space exploration project Starshot

stephen hawking yuri milner — Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner announcing the Breakthrough Initiatives in 2015 Getty Images

Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner are set to announce a space exploration initiative called Starshot. Hawking and Milner, the founder of DST Global and Breakthrough Prize, will reveal details of the initiative at a press conference at the One World Observatory in New York.

A livestream of the event Breakthrough Starshot can be viewed below or by clicking here. The event will begin at 12pm ET (5pm BST).

Last year, Hawking and Milner announced the $100m (£88m) global Breakthrough Initiatives, which aims to speed up the search for life in the universe. The first of the initiatives, Breakthrough Listen, was dubbed as the "most powerful, comprehensive and intensive scientific search ever undertaken for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth".

The second, Breakthrough Message, was to fund a competition to create messages to represent humanity, which could one day be sent to any potential intelligent lifeforms beyond our planet.

Commenting on the launch of Breakthrough Listen and Message were launched, Hawking said:

I'm here today because I believe the Breakthrough Initiatives, are critically important. To understand the Universe, you must know about atoms. About the forces that bind them. The contours of space and time. The birth and death of stars, the dance of galaxies. The secrets of black holes.

But that is not enough. These ideas cannot explain everything. They can explain the light of stars. But not the lights that shine from planet Earth. To understand these lights, you must know about life. About minds.

We believe that life arose spontaneously on Earth. So in an infinite universe, there must be other occurrences of life. Somewhere in the cosmos, perhaps, intelligent life may be watching these lights of ours, aware of what they mean.

Or do our lights wander a lifeless cosmos. Unseen beacons, announcing that here, on one rock, the Universe discovered its existence. Either way, there is no bigger question. It's time to commit to finding the answer - to search for life beyond Earth. The Breakthrough Initiatives are making that commitment. We are alive. We are intelligent. We must know.