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Asked by ragustinh to Alexandra, Dean, Jess, Luisa, Sian on 22 Jun 2010 in Categories: General.
Question: how long will it be until we can travel to other solar systems within a year???
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Dean Whittaker answered on 21 Jun 2010:
We can’t within a year to someone not on the spaceship. You can’t travel faster than the speed of light. The nearest star is proxima centuri (and I don’t think it has planets, but maybe it does). This is something like 4.2 light years away from us. So the quickest we could ever hope to get there is 4.2 years… However, for the people on the spaceship it will be different. The faster you travel, the slower your time is. So while it might be 5 years for people on earth, you will feel like it’s only been a week or so. So if we could get a ship to go close to the speed of light, then the people on board would be there in no time at all – but the people on earth would have to wait. This has been proven to be true by flying two clocks around the earth, one with the earth, one against it (so one is going a lot faster than the other). One clock did indeed tick slower than the other (only by miliseconds at these speeds).
Speed of light is about 300000000 m/s . The fastest spaceship goes at about 20000 m/s at the moment. Though if you have enough fuel, you can speed up a ship indefinitely because there’s nothing to slow you down in space – so they’re thinking of using solar sails that pick up solar winds to power ships. It’ll take a long time to reach high speeds, but it can do so without any fuel (which is difficult to take up with you!).
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Jessica Housden answered on 21 Jun 2010:
I think, unfortunately a very very long time until we would be technologically ready to get there.
Using all the methods that we know about today, it would take an object 2000 years to travel to the nearest solar system. This is using a technique (which hasn’t been used before but is in development) called solar sailing. The principle is that light is both a wave and a small particle called a photon. When the photon hits an object it transfers some of it’s force. So, if you let a very very large sail get close to the Sun (where there are lots of photons) and then turn away from it it would speed up to roughly 500 km per second. And, it would keep going because there is nothing in space to stop it. So, it would reach the nearest Solar system; I just don’t think we could have anyone on board as we wouldn’t be able to keep them alive. And there would be huge technology challenges; can you imagine your computer lasting 2000 years… Also, sending signals back to Earth would take several years.
The nearest other solar system is Alpha Centuri. It is just over 4 light years away; which means it take light from there 4 years to get here. So, if we could travel at the speed of light then it would only take 4 years. However, it is not believed to be possible to travel as fast as light!
Of course, there might be ways such as wormholes etc, but that has not been shown to possible yet.
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