Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Speed of LIght & Travel




Live in A Bubble - Travel Faster Than Light

Photobucket

Credit: Russell Croman

Explanation: It's the bubble versus the cloud. NGC 7635, the Bubble Nebula, is being pushed out by the stellar wind of massive central star BD+602522. Next door, though, lives a giant molecular cloud, visible above to the lower right. At this place in space, an irresistible force meets an immovable object in an interesting way. The cloud is able to contain the expansion of the bubble gas, but gets blasted by the hot radiation from the bubble's central star. The radiation heats up dense regions of the molecular cloud causing it to glow. This is NOT the bubble described in the article. However, this article gave me a beautiful excuse to post the gorgeous Bubble Nebula. :-)


"The method is based on the Alcubierre drive, which proposes expanding the fabric of space behind a ship and shrinking space-time in front of the ship. The ship would not actually move, rather the ship would sit in a bubble between the expanding and shrinking space-time dimensions. Since space would move around the ship, the theory does not violate Einstein's Theory of Relativity, which states that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate a massive object to the speed of light."

Maybe the scientists from the wild Texas are right. If so it'll definitely take forever before this theory becomes applied physics....:-)




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