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Limits and Signatures of Relativistic Spaceflight

posted by martyb on Saturday April 11 2015, @02:38PM   
from the 'contrails'-in-space! dept.

sudo rm -rf writes:

In an article published on arXiv.org [Full article available] California-based Raytheon engineers Ulvi Yurtsever and Steven Wilkinson say that any interstellar spacecraft traveling at near-light speed would leave distinct light signatures in its wake.

While special relativity imposes an absolute speed limit at the speed of light, our Universe is not empty Minkowski spacetime. The constituents that fill the interstellar/intergalactic vacuum, including the cosmic microwave background photons, impose a lower speed limit on any object traveling at relativistic velocities. Scattering of cosmic microwave photons from an ultra-relativistic object may create radiation with a characteristic signature allowing the detection of such objects at large distances.

• Frustrating if we can't get there anytime soon Frustrating if we can't get there anytime soon (Score: 4, Interesting) by CRCulver on Saturday April 11 2015, @04:33PM

  by CRCulver (4390) on Saturday April 11 2015, @04:33PM (#168982) Homepage

  This reminds me of the plot setup in Poul Anderson's last novel Starfarers [amazon.com] , not an especially great novel overall, but one that has a thoughtprovoking premise: humankind detects spacecraft moving at immense velocities tens or hundreds of light years away, and dispatches its own ship to meet this alien civilization. By the time that the travelers from Earth arrive at the given part of space, that advanced civilization is long gone. (Anderson suspected that even if a civilization mastered interstellar space travel, it might lose interest in it and revert to a sedentary population after a while – or just outright destroy itself in wars.) So, the speed of light is a bitch, and even if we saw suggestive signatures out there, it might just all remain a mystery without any way to travel there or communicate with said civilization.

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• Re:Frustrating if we can't get there anytime soon (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Saturday April 11 2015, @07:35PM

  by wonkey_monkey (279) on Saturday April 11 2015, @07:35PM (#169048) Homepage

  I recall another (short) story - I forget who by - in which the first definitive evidence of a very, very, very distant alien spaceship is detected by a radio telescope.

  Unfortunately, said detection was only possible at all because the spaceship had gone ultra-mega-space-kablooey.

  --
  systemd is Roko's Basilisk

  Parent