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For example, a spaceship could travel to a star 32 light-years away, initially accelerating at a constant 1.03g (i.e. 10.1 m/s 2) for 1.32 years (ship time), then stopping its engines and coasting for the next 17.3 years (ship time) at a constant speed, then decelerating again for 1.32 ship-years, and coming to a stop at the destination. After ...
In the context of this article, "faster-than-light" means the transmission of information or matter faster than c, a constant equal to the speed of light in vacuum, which is 299,792,458 m/s (by definition of the metre) [3] or about 186,282.397 miles per second.
If the near-light-speed space craft is interacting with matter that is moving slowly in the planetary reference frame, this will cause drag which will bleed off a portion of the engine's acceleration. A second big issue facing ships using constant acceleration for interstellar travel is colliding with matter and radiation while en route.
When communicating with distant space probes, it can take minutes to hours for signals to travel. In computing, the speed of light fixes the ultimate minimum communication delay. The speed of light can be used in time of flight measurements to measure large distances to extremely high precision.
Consider a space ship traveling from Earth to the nearest star system: a distance d = 4 light years away, at a speed v = 0.8c (i.e., 80% of the speed of light). To make the numbers easy, the ship is assumed to attain full speed in a negligible time upon departure (even though it would actually take about 9 months accelerating at 1 g to get up ...
The Alcubierre drive ([alkuˈβjere]) is a speculative warp drive idea according to which a spacecraft could achieve apparent faster-than-light travel by contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind it, under the assumption that a configurable energy-density field lower than that of vacuum (that is, negative mass) could be created.
An observer at rest observing an object travelling very close to the speed of light would observe the length of the object in the direction of motion as very near zero. Then, at a speed of 13 400 000 m/s (30 million mph, 0.0447 c ) contracted length is 99.9% of the length at rest; at a speed of 42 300 000 m/s (95 million mph, 0.141 c ), the ...
While it takes light approximately 2.54 million years to traverse the gulf of space between Earth and, for instance, the Andromeda Galaxy, it would take a much shorter amount of time from the point of view of a traveler at close to the speed of light due to the effects of time dilation; the time experienced by the traveler depending both on velocity (anything less than the speed of light) and ...