Can We Travel at the Speed of Light
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Take we made an object that could travel at at least 1% the speed of lite? – Anadi, age fourteen, Jammu and Kashmir, Republic of india
Low-cal is fast. In fact, it is the fastest thing that exists, and a law of the universe is that nothing can move faster than light. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometers per second) and can get from the Earth to the Moon in just over a second. Low-cal can streak from Los Angeles to New York in less than the glimmer of an eye.
While 1% of anything doesn't audio similar much, with calorie-free, that'southward still really fast – close to 7 million miles per hour! At ane% the speed of calorie-free, information technology would have a picayune over a second to get from Los Angeles to New York. This is more than 10,000 times faster than a commercial jet.
The fastest things ever made
Bullets can go 2,600 mph (4,200 kmh), more than iii times the speed of sound. The fastest shipping is NASA'south X3 jet plane, with a top speed of 7,000 mph (11,200 kph). That sounds impressive, but it'south notwithstanding but 0.001% the speed of light.
The fastest human-made objects are spacecraft. They use rockets to break free of the Globe's gravity, which takes a speed of 25,000 mph (forty,000 kmh). The spacecraft that is traveling the fastest is NASA's Parker Solar Probe. After information technology launched from Earth in 2018, it skimmed the Sunday's scorching atmosphere and used the Dominicus's gravity to reach 330,000 mph (535,000 kmh). That'due south blindingly fast – yet simply 0.05% of the speed of calorie-free.
Why even i% of light speed is difficult
What's property humanity dorsum from reaching i% of the speed of light? In a discussion, energy. Any object that's moving has energy due to its motion. Physicists call this kinetic energy. To go faster, you need to increase kinetic free energy. The problem is that it takes a lot of kinetic energy to increment speed. To make something go twice as fast takes iv times the free energy. Making something become three times every bit fast requires ix times the energy, and so on.
For example, to go a teenager who weighs 110 pounds (50 kilograms) to 1% of the speed of light would toll 200 trillion Joules (a measurement of free energy). That'southward roughly the same corporeality of energy that 2 1000000 people in the U.South. use in a day.
How fast can we go?
It's possible to get something to 1% the speed of light, but information technology would just take an enormous amount of free energy. Could humans make something go fifty-fifty faster?
Yes! But engineers need to figure out new ways to make things movement in space. All rockets, even the sleek new rockets used by SpaceX and Blueish Origins, burn rocket fuel that isn't very dissimilar from gasoline in a car. The problem is that called-for fuel is very inefficient.
Other methods for pushing a spacecraft involve using electric or magnetic forces. Nuclear fusion, the process that powers the Sun, is also much more efficient than chemic fuel.
Scientists are researching many other ways to get fast – even warp drives, the faster-than-calorie-free travel popularized by Star Trek.
One promising way to go something moving very fast is to utilize a solar canvas. These are large, thin sheets of plastic attached to a spacecraft and designed so that sunlight can push on them, similar air current in a normal canvas. A few spacecraft accept used solar sails to show that they piece of work, and scientists think that a solar sheet could propel spacecraft to 10% of the speed of light.
One day, when humanity is non limited to a tiny fraction of the speed of low-cal, nosotros might travel to the stars.
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Source: https://theconversation.com/have-we-made-an-object-that-could-travel-1-the-speed-of-light-170849
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