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From the planetary frame of reference, the ship's speed will appear to be limited by the speed of light — it can approach the speed of light, but never reach it. If a ship is using 1 g constant acceleration, it will appear to get near the speed of light in about a year, and have traveled about half a light year in distance. For the middle of ...
Transversal time dilation. The blue dots represent a pulse of light. Each pair of dots with light "bouncing" between them is a clock. In the frame of each group of clocks, the other group is measured to tick more slowly, because the moving clock's light pulse has to travel a larger distance than the stationary clock's light pulse.
Formally, c is a conversion factor for changing the unit of time to the unit of space. [4] This makes it the only speed which does not depend either on the motion of an observer or a source of light and / or gravity. Thus, the speed of "light" is also the speed of gravitational waves, and further the speed of any massless particle.
Gravitational time dilation is closely related to gravitational redshift, [4] in which the closer a body emitting light of constant frequency is to a gravitating body, the more its time is slowed by gravitational time dilation, and the lower (more "redshifted") would seem to be the frequency of the emitted light, as measured by a fixed observer.
The light-cones define a causal structure: for each event A, there is a set of events that can, in principle, either influence or be influenced by A via signals or interactions that do not need to travel faster than light (such as event B in the image), and a set of events for which such an influence is impossible (such as event C in the image).
The gravitational weakening of light from high-gravity stars was predicted by John Michell in 1783 and Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1796, using Isaac Newton's concept of light corpuscles (see: emission theory) and who predicted that some stars would have a gravity so strong that light would not be able to escape.
According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, particles of negligible mass travel along geodesics in the space-time. In uncurved space-time, far from a source of gravity, these geodesics correspond to straight lines; however, they may deviate from straight lines when the space-time is curved.
The idea can be stated in the form that, due to quantum gravity effects, there is a minimum distance beyond which the force of gravity no longer continues to increase as the distance between the masses becomes shorter, or alternatively that interpenetrating particle waves mask gravitational effects that would be felt at a distance.