anomalien.com
Speed of Light Poses a Problem for Interstellar Communication
Researchers have presented the results of a study that reveals one of the most difficult problems of space travel – communication with ships moving at speeds close to the speed of light.
In their work, scientists from the United States, including David Messerschmitt, Ian Morrison, Thomas Mozdzen and Philip Lubin, study what difficulties may arise when communicating with such devices sent to distant stars. The article is available on the preprint server arXiv.
Imagine a spaceship that is constantly accelerating, creating an acceleration equal to the Earth’s gravity (1g). Such a craft could theoretically reach incredible speeds, close to the speed of light. However, despite all the power of such a machine, its crew would face serious communication problems.
As scientists’ calculations show, the faster the ship approaches the speed of light, the greater the gap between it and the signals sent from Earth.
Because of the finite speed of light, messages begin to lag behind the craft, like waves trying to catch up with a speedboat. After a certain time, the signals simply stop reaching the ship, leaving it without communication with its home planet.
This phenomenon is aggravated by the effect of time dilation, also called relativistic dilation. For the crew on board, time flows more slowly than for observers on Earth.
For example, for an astronaut, a journey to the center of our Galaxy will take only about 20 years, while on Earth it will take almost 26 thousand years! But travelers will reach the edge of the visible Universe in 45 years, although the distance is tens of billions of light years.
Even if the ship decides to turn back, the situation will not improve. In the second scenario considered by scientists, the ship first accelerates its movement and then begins to slow down.
In this case, the connection with Earth is disrupted in the same way as with constant acceleration. Messages will begin to arrive only towards the end of the journey, when the ship slows down enough to catch them. Until then, all information will remain inaccessible.
But that’s not all. Signals transmitted from the ship will be subject to the Doppler effect, similar to the change in the sound of a car siren as it gets closer and further away.
This means that antennas on Earth must be able to pick up the changing frequency of the signals. In addition, the light from moving objects is concentrated into a narrow cone pointing forward, making it difficult to transmit information.
The study’s authors emphasize that such space expeditions will inevitably become fully autonomous missions.
“Crews will have to abandon the idea of maintaining operational interaction with Earth for most of the flight,” the article says. This prospect calls into question the possibility of creating long-term connections between people on Earth and in deep space.
In short, even if humanity one day creates super-fast spacecraft capable of traveling to other stars, their crews will have to cope with unknown difficulties while remaining cut off from home.
The post Speed of Light Poses a Problem for Interstellar Communication appeared first on Anomalien.com.