Astronomers have found potential habitable planet

[Ryme]

Gravity can be simulated with centripetal force easy enough.

Also the idea of tachyons moving faster than light is important because it's generally believed that they have a non-zero mass and the idea of an object with a non-zero rest mass accelerating to the speed of light and beyond defies the current laws of physics. So finding them would be pretty revolutionary.

But so far there's nothing to indicate they exist.

Tachyons don't accelerate past the speed of light, they are born moving faster than it. At no stage are they slower or equal to the speed of light. Getting something to accelerate beyond the speed of light is a whole other, far messier, can of worms than having something simply always exist moving faster than light.

---------- Post added 2012-11-09 at 12:09 PM ----------

Lets say hypothetically you are on a ship that is moving at the speed of light. While on the ship you run from one side to the other. In terms of relativity did you just move faster than the speed of light?

Let's say you're going just shy of the speed of light, because otherwise this breaks down and a whole bunch of 0s, errors and infinities appear. If you were going just shy of the speed of light, time would "compensate" for you here, it would be running exceptionally slowly for you to ensure that you never breached the speed of light relative to anyone else.

That wording is horrible by the way, but it's a complicated issue.

[Deleted]

i will gladly move there to start rebellion against earth

[arcticsnow]

Apologies for my lack of knowledge, just looked it up and you're correct.

However, living on a planet where we weigh twice as much is still not going to happen. We'd still require machines or some kind of contraption to get about effeciently.

Although i supose you'd get more of a work out [COLOR="red"]

Most likely your muscles would adapt over time. After being in space for so long, most likely there would be issues even if you were to return to earth, but if there was artificial gravity, it could be slowly increased until you arrived at the new planet, so its not a sudden jolt on your bones and muscles, but it is most likely something the body would be able to deal with. There would be less people over weight, because you would constantly be doing more work.

[Masark]

What would happen if the spaceship hit an astroid(or any space debree, or even another planet) at .99c?

Assuming the ship and debris are of approximately equal size, the result would be an explosive release of energy approximately equal to the annihilation of 3.5 times the ship's mass in antimatter, which comes to roughly one B61 nuclear bomb at maximum yield setting per gram of ship.

[Romeo83x]

What would happen if the spaceship hit an astroid(or any space debree, or even another planet) at .99c?

A small black hole would appear and then briefly disappear again because it doesn't have enough energy to sustain itself.

[Wikiy]

What would happen if the spaceship hit an astroid(or any space debree, or even another planet) at .99c?

The collision would release 43 billion times more energy than the most powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba, which was, in turn, 6250 times more powerful than the one detonated over Hiroshima.

[Deleted]

I'm really just making up numbers...I have no idea how the math of time dilation actually works.

Neither did I, and it's really interesting; this link shows the extent of time dilation at different velocities.

[Tradewind]

Tachyons don't accelerate past the speed of light, they are born moving faster than it. At no stage are they slower or equal to the speed of light. Getting something to accelerate beyond the speed of light is a whole other, far messier, can of worms than having something simply always exist moving faster than light.

I thought the whole idea is that they have an imaginary mass so their v is going to be >c and then there's the whole problem of causality. But the imaginary mass was the whole "revelations" thing and causality is just the headache part.

Granted what I am about to say is based on my vast reading of hard science fiction, and a few episodes of Carl Sagan's old TV show...

You have that sort of backwards. on a ship traveling at near the speed of light the crew would experience time slowing down. Essentially a minute on the ship would take a lot longer to elapse than for someone on the Earth. That means if I said I would call you when i got bock from a 84 light year trip, you would have to wait around 84 years before I called back. Me on the ship...it would seem to ME that the trip would only have taken something like 12 years.

I'm really just making up numbers...I have no idea how the math of time dilation actually works.

It's relative to the observer, as an observer on the ship is moving at the speed of light as well, time shouldn't slow down for them and they still need to traverse 42LY to their destination but in that time the observer on the ship would see their clock moving at a normal rate. However a stationary observer on Earth for example would be seeing their clock moving much slower.

Using t1 = t0/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2), even at half the speed of light the 84 year trip to get to this super earth will have taken 97 years to a stationary observer.

edit: math in the morning! mixed days and years and bedmas.

[Frazzle.d]

Well yes that might be true... But we could like in co-existance?

Co---- what? You mean, like not blowing each other up and shooting each other over jumping a queue or drug money?

Here's hoping the other planet - if it has intelligent, sentient and technologically advanced life, that it has quite good satellite defence systems to pew pew us out of the sky before we even make landfall and do themselves a massive favour.

[Masark]

Using t1 = t0/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2), even at half the speed of light the 84 year trip to get to this super earth will have taken 32,200 years to a stationary observer.

Umm, what?

I think you bobbled your equation there. at 0.5c, your tau would only be 0.865, which would make your 84 year trip take about 97 years to an observer.

[Tradewind]

Umm, what?

I think you bobbled your equation there. at 0.5c, your tau would only be 0.865, which would put your 84 year trip take about 97 years to an observer.

Oops, I was going for days not years. You're correct and my calculator fucked up the order of operations lol.

t0 = 84/sqrt(1-149896229^2/299792458^2)

[Sackman]

sure sounds good... except for the 42 light year thing. If im not mistaken, a lightyear is the distance light travels on a year, which is pretty fucking far, and i doubt we can survive 42 years in space in a spaceship able to go up to lightspeed. Imagine the costs to build such ship compared to how many people we get to the other planet

You could keep that speed for quite a long time to be honest. There is little friction in space.

And 42 light years is a tiny distance in astronomical terms. This is a great find.

[Deleted]

Because world wars tend to have billions of deaths, right?

Yeh sorry couldn't resist I know it's off topic and I'm not one of those emo but...
You do know we never had an atomic war do you?
The last 2 "world wars" were fought with bayonets man.

---------- Post added 2012-11-09 at 07:25 PM ----------

Assuming the ship and debris are of approximately equal size, the result would be an explosive release of energy approximately equal to the annihilation of 3.5 times the ship's mass in antimatter, which comes to roughly one B61 nuclear bomb at maximum yield setting per gram of ship.

Yeh that doesn't sound good alright.

[abovebeyond]

Yeah until we find away to travel light years of space quicker it'll be moot besides. I want to live on Earth not on another planet. If anything storage or using it as resources would be better.

This is essentially saying that our ancestors should've stayed in Africa and never left the continent, except for "resources". It is human nature to expand and colonize. Currently, all of our eggs are in one basket. If we do not figure out a way to colonize space, we are just wasting our existence waiting for extinction by celestial object.

[Themius]

One day science will be able to make ships that move through space at an effective speed of 10x the speed of light. So in that day, it wouldn't be "too"far.

[smelltheglove]

kind of curious about the gravity, and it's affect on people. there really isnt enough info from this article to determine it. they use the word "massive"... are they using the scientific meaning, or using it colloquially to mean "size"? huge difference here. isnt gravity more of an effect of density more than sheer size? i know mass is key, but im thinking the size to mass proportion is what sets the field

[Deleted]

One day science will be able to make ships that move through space at an effective speed of 10x the speed of light. So in that day, it wouldn't be "too"far.

It'd still take 4.2 years to get there.

[Tradewind]

kind of curious about the gravity, and it's affect on people. there really isnt enough info from this article to determine it. they use the word "massive"... are they using the scientific meaning, or using it colloquially to mean "size"? huge difference here. isnt gravity more of an effect of density more than sheer size? i know mass is key, but im thinking the size to mass proportion is what sets the field

Yeah it's mass/density in relation to radius, g=GM/r^2. A planet twice the radius of earth and 4x the mass would result in it having nearly equal surface gravity. Though I would say that's unlikely to be the ratio.

[smelltheglove]

Yeah it's mass/density in relation to radius, g=GM/r^2. A planet twice the radius of earth and 4x the mass would result in it having nearly equal surface gravity. Though I would say that's unlikely to be the ratio.

ours is also actually an incredibly dense planet. we are blessed with an iron core, and a lot of heavy metals. from what i understand, while not rare, this is fairly unusual

[Tradewind]

ours is also actually an incredibly dense planet. we are blessed with an iron core, and a lot of heavy metals. from what i understand, while not rare, this is fairly unusual

I'd guess that due to the fact our planet's composition and that iron core is what drives our magnetic field, protecting our atmosphere from being blasted off the surface by the sun that a similar "life-supporting" planet with a comparable atmosphere would possess some of the same properties. But that's pure speculation.