Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the earth, is 4.243 light years away i.e. the fastest spacecraft New Horizons with the Earth-relative velocity of about 16.26 km/s (58,536 km/h), would make take 78,084 years and 11days 22hrs. WHAT??????
Faster-than-light travel has always been a staple of science fiction, but recently physicists have given serious thought to this possibility.
According to Einstein, the speed of light is the ultimate speed limit in the universe. Even our most powerful atom smashers, which can create energies found only at the center of exploding stars or the big bang itself, cannot
hurl subatomic particles at a rate faster than the speed of light. Apparently the speed of light is the ultimate traffic cop in the universe. If so, any hope of our reaching the distant galaxies seems to be dashed.
Einstein's celebrated equation E=mc2 states that for a body to attain the speed of light it has to have an infinite source of energy. Furthermore, the faster an object travels, more of it's energy is converted to mass.
Regarding these two facts, and weighing them to our current state of technology, we don't have the enough resources to propel any earthly thing to the distant stars anywhere near. Even if we do manage to find the ultimate
energy source there still lies this inevitable problem. Anything with mass, the more it accelerates the more energy gets converted to mass.So, till the object reaches the speed of light it would have gained an infinite amount of
mass.
Faster-than-light travel has always been a staple of science fiction, but recently physicists have given serious thought to this possibility.
According to Einstein, the speed of light is the ultimate speed limit in the universe. Even our most powerful atom smashers, which can create energies found only at the center of exploding stars or the big bang itself, cannot
hurl subatomic particles at a rate faster than the speed of light. Apparently the speed of light is the ultimate traffic cop in the universe. If so, any hope of our reaching the distant galaxies seems to be dashed.
Einstein's celebrated equation E=mc2 states that for a body to attain the speed of light it has to have an infinite source of energy. Furthermore, the faster an object travels, more of it's energy is converted to mass.
Regarding these two facts, and weighing them to our current state of technology, we don't have the enough resources to propel any earthly thing to the distant stars anywhere near. Even if we do manage to find the ultimate
energy source there still lies this inevitable problem. Anything with mass, the more it accelerates the more energy gets converted to mass.So, till the object reaches the speed of light it would have gained an infinite amount of
mass.
No comments:
Post a Comment