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Faster-than-light (superluminal or supercausal) travel and communication are the conjectural propagation of matter or information faster than the speed of light (c). The special theory of relativity implies that only particles with zero rest mass (i.e., photons ) may travel at the speed of light, and that nothing may travel faster.
The ship will be close to the speed of light after about a year of accelerating and remain at that speed until it brakes for the end of the journey. From the perspective of an onboard observer, the crew will feel a gravitational field opposite the engine's acceleration, and the universe ahead will appear to fall in that field, undergoing ...
The speed of light is the upper limit for the speeds of objects with positive rest mass, and individual photons cannot travel faster than the speed of light. [39] This is experimentally established in many tests of relativistic energy and momentum. [40]
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 ...
Relativistic rocket means any spacecraft that travels close enough to light speed for relativistic effects to become significant. The meaning of "significant" is a matter of context, but often a threshold velocity of 30% to 50% of the speed of light (0.3c to 0.5c) is used.
One twin blasts off in a spaceship traveling close to the speed of light, and one twin stays behind on Earth. When the space-traveling twin returns to Earth, she's only aged a couple of years, but ...
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 transverse velocity of the beam along the path in the sky between the objects has an apparent speed greater than light, but this represents separate photons of light. No photons are traveling the path from object 1 to object 2; the photons in the light beam are traveling a radial path outward from the lighthouse, at the speed of light.