Questions tagged [interstellar-travel]
The interstellar-travel tag has no usage guidance.
48 questions
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What are some highly unstable phenomena you can observe from lightyears away?
I'm currently drafting some scifi story where the protagonist is in a long timeloop and wants to figure out when the loop starts exactly based on observing some unstable phenomena, like atomic decay ...
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John, in his spaceship traveling at relativistic speed, is crossing the Milky Way in 500 years. How many supernovae explosions would he experience?
John, in his spaceship traveling at a stable relativistic speed, is crossing the Milky Way in 500 years of his own time.
How many supernovae explosions would he experience?
From my reference frame on ...
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Can Quantum Energy Teleportation theoretically be used for interstellar travel?
I see that, recently, Quantum Energy Teleportation has become real physics: https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-use-quantum-mechanics-to-pull-energy-out-of-nothing-20230222/
Could this be ...
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How to include the effect of cosmological expansion in the close to speed of light calculations of a relativistic rocket?
I calculated time ago as undergraduated and post it at my blog the calculations for traveling through the Universe in a (special) relativist way. At what level and how should we include the effect of ...
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Could crashing be used to save energy slowing down from interstellar speeds
A challenge with interstellar travel is carrying enough matter to slow down from a significant fraction of light speed. If instead you simply crashed into a planet, it would mean many orders of ...
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Given the Heliopause temps approach 30,000-50,000C does it seem possible humans can ever leave our Solar System?
Most rocks and elements are molten on earth before 10,000C correct?
Does that mean that nothing on earth could withstand the heliopause temperatures of 30,000-50,000C? If this is correct, then: ...
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Length of light burst of concentrated emission from hydrogen bomb in outer space
Imagine a large hydrogen bomb in outer space. Behind it is a huge mylar parabolic mirror. (Aimed anywhere, for instance at a star system we want to communicate with.)
The bomb is placed in the focus ...
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Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary - Does the travel time to Tau Ceti make sense? [duplicate]
I'm an English teacher with a modest science background teaching Science Through Science Fiction this fall, and I need some help with the physics in Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary. Here's one question ...
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How would a Dyson sphere move our sun/solar system?
After watching "How to move the sun: Stellar Engines" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3y8AIEX_dU) I still do not understand how the Dyson sphere would work.
It seems to me like you would ...
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What is the temperature of empty space if a spaceship is travelling at half the speed of light?
Whenever someone talks about sending robots to extra-solar planets by accelerating them close to the speed of light (perhaps using lasers) - for example I believe Hawking suggested this. It always ...
user84158
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Would stellar engines cause their planets to experience time dilation? [duplicate]
For instance, if the stellar engine is moving the solar system at relativistic speeds, would, say, a 5,000 light year voyage be shorter for the inhabitants of a planet, or would the trip still take 5,...
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Thermonuclear propulsion in space, colliding hydrogen pellets on counter-rotating orbits
What if we send a swarm of tiny space-crafts contaning pellets of hydrogen (e.g. deuterium) in shells (I guess metallic) to elliptical counter-rotating orbits around the Sun (or another massive object,...
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Muons and Electrons Rare Beauty decay
Concerning this recent news from CERN:
CERN data on ‘beauty quarks’ behaviour may rewrite physics as we know it (TRT World, 24 March 2021)
My son and I (now 13yo) have been doing home based weighing ...
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Does special relativity imply that I can reach a star 100 light years away in less than 100 years? [duplicate]
I am just starting familiarizing myself with special relativity, and want to understand if the following is a correct thought process:
Consider a star that is 100 light years away from Earth, from my ...
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Could we see (detect) spaceship passing through our solar system at say 99% speed of light?
Could not find answer via web search. To avoid motion blur we use high speed cameras. For seeing with high speed more light is needed lighting-for-high-speed.
If alien spaceship would not emit ...
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At 50% c, I go party to IC1101 galaxy, and back home. How many times can i go before the expansion of the universe will lock me on one side? [closed]
Longer version of the question:
Let's say I'm an immortal being (I could be artificial) going to "party" to IC1101, one of the biggest galaxies of the universe, 1 billion light-years away ...
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Traveling to another solar system without "spatial holes" and without falling in the twin paradox
I understand that traveling to the nearest solar system (Alpha Centauri, 4.37 light-years from the Sun) is very complex not only because the need of proper thrusting and human and/or robot safety, but ...
user155243
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Is there any experimental evidence of CTC?
One consequence of general relativity is a solution called the closed time like curve or CTC...which could allow you to view a place at an earlier point in time or possibly even travel back in time.
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How fast can we get to Alpha Centauri?
Suppose in the near future we send an Antimatter rocket that is capable of constant $1g$ acceleration to our nearest star, Alpha Centauri, $4.3$ light years away and suppose we want the spacecraft to ...
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how do we navigate space without knowing the position of everything? wouldn't the gravity affect the sattelite/ship?
I tried looking for other questions but I couldn't find any. (if this is a duplicate, then I'm sorry, I just signed up, so I'm not sure what to search for)
I was wondering, how do we navigate into ...
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What do we see if we observe the spaceship coming from a planet that's inside the event horizon? [closed]
Well, after watching the movie Interstellar, I just ask myself:
What would I see if I observe the ship that Cooper and the other girl in, coming from the planet inside the event horizon of Gargantua? ...
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Constant acceleration space travel and speed of light in ship's reference
In a constant acceleration travel like depicted here, it is said that after some months of acceleration at 1g, in the ship reference frame, we would be going faster than C relative to Earth, ...
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Path to a distant star
Suppose we have a space ship that can go fast enough (0.9c) and we have plenty of time, and we want to travel to a star on the other side of the galaxy. How do you plot a path to navigate to that star?...
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The interstellar medium reflects extremely low-frequency radio waves. Could we use this fact to build a more efficient photon rocket?
According to the equations of MHD, electromagnetic waves cannot propagate in a plasma if they are below the plasma frequency. (For more information, see this question about astronomical-wavelength ...
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How can one feed a small black hole against 1 TW of Hawking radiation's radiation pressure?
This question was inspired by an old post here on meta, about a previous question of the same type that had been removed because it "had too much science fiction", in particular the author added a lot ...
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How long would it take, using existing technology, to travel 40 light years? [closed]
The exciting discovery of 7 earth-like planets 40 light years away raises the following question: If an exploration mission is scheduled to one or more of these planets in 2017 to find a possible home ...
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Why the space suit looks white in Millers planet in the movie Interstellar? [closed]
The accretion disk of Gargantua (the black hole in the movie) is
red (or orange) in color (probably because of red shift due to intense gravity?). And the Millers planet is revolving around this black ...
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Space travel - communication of the arrival time
I have a particular passion for space travel and so, for fun, I'm trying to identify the possible problems in comunication systems for a spaceship that moves at sensible fraction of speed of light in ...
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Is space travel really possible?
Just a thought, does not relate to actual physics
If the universe is really expanding, then if we send probes to distant locations in the universe with earthly data, then will the probes ever reach ...
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So what happens to your personal time and space, exactly, when you get close, or even match, the speed of light?
1g seems to be the value of choice. We get on the ship with sufficient fuel to provide 1g acceleration for a century. Off we go, aiming for some distant star or galaxy. Let's call this star Jeff. Let'...
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Locating a possible habitable zone in an ordered hierarchal septenary star system?
I'm writing a story about potential off-world colonization in the dawn of interstellar commerce, and despite such a plot necessitating some degree of FTL travel I'd like to keep the rest of my science ...
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Relativistic Rocket Fuel Requirements
I am trying to reconcile two different calculations of fuel for a 1g constant acceleration/deceleration trip to Alpha Centauri.
One found here (http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/...
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How would one attach black hole to starship in the Black hole Starship model? [closed]
A black hole starship is a theoretical idea for enabling interstellar travel by propelling a starship by creating an artificial black hole and using a parabolic reflector to reflect its Hawking ...
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What the live streaming of a time traveler will look like?
Consider a hypothetical situation: In which a time traveler travels in a spaceplane at close to speed of light circling the earth and I get a live telecast of inside of that plane to my television.
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Is near light speed travel possible? Likely?
I was contemplating the possibility of sending an interstellar probe that can produce results in a reasonable time frame.
For such a mission to be realistic, the spacecraft would have to travel at ...
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Take advantage of time dilation or create a warp drive? [closed]
It is my understanding that time dilation slows down perceived time relative to the outside of a given vessel as it approaches the speed of light. Does that not mean that the inhabitants of said ...
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Constant Jerk Relativistic Rocket [duplicate]
A quick google search will give many helpful pages and calculators regarding constant acceleration relativistic rockets, but my question is somewhat different.
What if jerk is the parameter to be ...
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Question about Voyager 1
Voyager 1 is currently travelling at 38000 miles per hour in interstellar space. Of course, in a few years time all its functions will eventually shut down but it will remain at the same velocity of ...
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Getting signals from a probe light years away
Is it only because we don't have fast enough spacecrafts that we don't send probes to nearby stars? Do we have sufficient radio technology? If a probe like new horizons was as far as the nearest stars,...
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Is the fifth dimension of Interstellar the same as Block Universe theory? [closed]
Is the movie Interstellar (2014) referring to Block Universe theory of space-time with its concept of a fifth dimension?
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Acceleration format and interstellar units
Calculating with m/s$^2$ is very helpful when dealing with acceleration on the human range, as accelerating from rest at 4 m/s$^2$ for 3 seconds will give a velocity of 12 m/s. g is also a very ...
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If it takes less than a year to accelerate to the speed of light at 1g why will it take the Voyager 10,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri?
Today I was doing my physics homework and there was a problem involving a space ship falling at 9.8 m/(s^2) to simulate gravity, and it asked how long would it take for the ship to reach to speed of ...
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How would you connect a destination to a wormhole from your starting point to travel through it?
Lets say it was possible to create as massive traversable wormholes as we want. Say we
started from earth and wanted to cross to alpha centauri. How would I create the wormhole
so that it leads ...
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Spaceships travelling through space and debris
How can a spaceship travel through space if there is space debris flying around at very high speeds?
Wouldn't even a small rock crack through the spaceship?
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Finding interplanetary flight trajectory using calculus of variations?
Consider two orbits $x(t),\space y(t)$ representing the origin and destination for some spaceflight of interest. These could be, for example, cycloids describing LEO and another orbit circling, say, ...
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micro black hole forces
A black hole would radiate mass optimally for interstellar-travel applications in the range between $10^7$ and $10^8$ kilograms. Assuming a light-only radiation emission spectrum, with a parabolic ...
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What sort of propulsion would we require for interstellar travel?
Further to this question I asked recently, lgritz makes a very astute observation about the massive fuel requirements to travel 36 lt yrs with known fuel technology today. So, if conventional rocket ...
giulio
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How long does it take to travel 36 light years with tolerable acceleration and deceleration?
The recent discovery of HD85512b only 36 light years from Earth has promising attributes to harbor life. Assuming we want to travel there, we cannot instantaneously jump to light speed, (StarTrek ...
giulio