Traveling at Light Speed

David Burns produced an engine concept that, he says, could theoretically accelerate to 99 percent 

of the speed of light - all without using propellant. (CREDIT: Creative Commons)

When it comes to space, there's a problem with our human drive to go all the places and see all the things. A big problem. It's, well, space. It's way too big. Even travelling at the maximum speed the Universe allows, it would take us years to reach our nearest neighbouring star.


But another human drive is finding solutions to big problems. And that's what NASA engineer David Burns has been doing in his spare time. He's produced an engine concept that, he says, could theoretically accelerate to 99 percent of the speed of light - all without using propellant.


He's posted it to the NASA Technical Reports Server under the heading "Helical Engine", and, on paper, it works by exploiting the way mass can change at relativistic speeds - those close to the speed of light in a vacuum. It has not yet been reviewed by an expert.


Understandably this paper has caused buzz approaching levels seen in the early days of the EM Drive. And yes, even some headlines claiming the engine could 'violate the laws of physics'.


But while this concept is fascinating, it's definitely not going to break physics anytime soon.  READ MORE...

Beyond our Reach

Even if we traveled at the speed of light, we'd never catch up to these galaxies.

Distant galaxies, like those found in the Hercules galaxy cluster, are not only redshifted and receding away from us, but their apparent recession speed is accelerating. Many of the most distant galaxies in this image are receding from us at speeds that appear to exceed the speed of light. We will never be able to reach any of the ones presently located more than 18 billion light-years away. (Credit: ESO/INAF-VST/OmegaCAM. Acknowledgement:  OmegaCen/Astro-WISE/Kapteyn Institute.)

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• The universe is expanding, with every galaxy beyond the Local Group speeding away from us.
• Today, most of the universe's galaxies are already receding faster than the speed of light.
• All galaxies currently beyond 18 billion light-years are forever unreachable by us, no matter how much time passes.
• Our universe, everywhere and in all directions, is filled with stars and galaxies.

The Milky Way, as seen at La Silla observatory, is a stunning, awe-inspiring sight to anyone, and offers a spectacular view of a great many stars in our galaxy. Beyond our galaxy, however, are trillions of others, nearly all of which are expanding away from us. (Credit: ESO / Håkon Dahle)

• From our vantage point, we observe up to 46.1 billion light-years away.

As long as the light from any galaxy that was emitted at the start of the hot Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago would have reached us by today, that object is within our presently observable universe. However, not every observable object is reachable. (Credit: F. Summers, A. Pagan, L. Hustak, G. Bacon, Z. Levay, and L. Frattere (STScI))

• Our visible universe contains an estimated ~2 trillion galaxies.

The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF) may have observed a region of sky just 1/32,000,000th of the total, but was able to uncover a whopping 5,500 galaxies within it: an estimated 10% of the total number of galaxies actually contained in this pencil-beam-style slice. The remaining 90% of galaxies are either too faint or too red or too obscured for Hubble to reveal. (Credit: HUDF09 and HUDF12 teams; Processing: E. Siegel)

However, most of them are already permanently unreachable by us.

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