Need to send a message across interstellar space? Use the sun for a signal boost...........

A new proposal has come from independent astrophysicist Michael Hippke, that suggests - the sun’s gravity could be used to amplify signals from an interstellar space probe, allowing video to be streamed from as far away as Alpha Centauri. Though the technology to do it has already been invented.
Though we don’t have probes far out enough to take advantage of this technology till date, it may eventually come in handy for interstellar communications. Building the communications grid now makes calls to our own spacecraft – or that of another alien race – a future possibility.
 One of the limiting factors in interstellar communication
is the size of the receiving telescope. Achievable data rates scale with the square of the diameter of a circular aperture for a wide range of parameters. One way to increase the receiver is the use of the solar gravitational lens (SGL) as a telescope. Albert Einstein predicted the bending of light around the Sun (Einstein 1911, 1915), which was experimentally verified only a few years later
during solar eclipses .It has been suggested to use a star as a gravitational lens for communication  and to send a sail-propelled mission to the required > 550 au from our Sun (Maccone & Matlo 1994). Such a communication channel might be promising for interstellar probes:The photon gain is large for a given telescope
aperture, and the distance is small compared to interstellar travel , occurring precursor and/or accompanying mission options. It has not been shown ,yet that the concept is feasible for real communication.

“challenging but not impossible.” Slava Turyshev, a physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory ,said about Hippke’s plan . The receiving spacecraft needn’t even come to a complete stop because it could still get signals up to 300 billion km from the sun.
Turyshev says a slingshot around the sun might work to get one out to the 90-billion-kilometre mark in a time frame of 25 to 30 years.
Despite various challenges are involved in such an ambitious project, Hippke says humans have launched larger space telescopes than what he is proposing.  “This is much easier than building the Hubble Space Telescope,” he says.

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Reference: arxiv.org/abs/1706.05570