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January 14th, 2013, 21:21 GMT · By

What Hyperspace Really Looks Like or How CMBR Becomes Visible Again

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Entering hyperspace in Star Wars
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Doing anything interesting in space, from a movie perspective, means going faster than the speed of light. The concept has been explored ever since Einstein first proposed that the speed of light is the absolute top speed at which anything in the universe can travel.

One way to get around the limit is the so-called hyperspace or variations on the same concept, a method of bending the actual space around you to still technically respect the speed limit while actually traveling faster from point A to point B.

You've seen this portrayed in various ways in movies and TV shows, a popular representation was showing light sources trail as the ship accelerated, like in Star Trek or Star Wars.

Students at the University of Leicester decided to determine what you'd actually see if you were going faster than the speed of light and the result is remarkably less spectacular than what movie makers come up with. It also happens to be more scientifically accurate.

What you would be seeing in a ship traveling faster than light was a bright white glow surrounding you and nothing else.

While a white blur may not be particularly spectacular to look at, the reason why you'd see nothing but white is quite interesting.

What traveling in hyperspace would actually look like
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The Doppler effect affects any traveling wave, including light. As we move closer to a light source, the wavelength gets shorter, the frequency gets higher so the light gets bluer.

Conversely, as we move away from a light source, the waves are stretched out pushing the light towards the reds, what is called redshift.

Most people would be more familiar with redshift in astronomy, it's what pushes distant light into the infrared spectrum and very distant light into the microwave range.

Blueshift obviously has the opposite effect. At speeds higher than the speed of light, the blueshift effect would be so powerful that normal visible light would be pushed into the X-ray spectrum.

At the same time, the cosmic microwave background radiation, which originated from light created in the early days of the universe, 13 billion or so years ago, is pushed into the visible spectrum.

So people on a ship traveling faster than the speed of light would be seeing the light of the early universe as it was in the early universe.


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Comment #1 by: leroy30 on 15 Jan 2013, 07:42 UTC reply to this comment

To "bend" space around you all you need to do is move faster than your current speed. Thanks to relativity if we are travelling at the speed of light, we are still stationary from our point of view. It is everything around us that is moving. Isn't that what we have time dialation for?

So if I travel at the speed of light everyone from the outside sees I have reached some 'limit' but from my perspective I can keep accelerating until I reach my planet on the other side of the solar system. Granted the outside observer will see it take me a long long time but from my perspective it will seem like a short journey and therefore if you do the math I just 'travelled faster than the speed of light'.

Now, I don't have any expertise in the matter so I am probably way off but at least if no one finds this informative then at least it will be humorous lol.

Ciao.

Le-roy Staines

Comment #1.1 by: Lucian Parfeni on 15 Jan 2013, 12:27 GMT

That's the point, you wouldn't keep accelerating. To accelerate you need a reference point, something from which to measure your speed. So while you may consider yourself standing still, the reference point would not, it would accelerate towards the speed of light, from your perspective, but never quite reach it.

You don't "bend" space simply by traveling through it, only gravity does that. Granted, traveling faster means your "relativistic" mass increases since mass equals energy as famously demonstrated by Einstein. Still that effect doesn't really change things in this case.

What's more, while the trip may seem shorter to you than to an outside observer this depends on your reference point. If you consider yourself standing still, then the observer would be traveling at close to the speed of light, in which case, their "trip" would seem shorter than yours. In the end, it all cancels each other out, it still takes a set amount of time to travel a given distance.


Comment #2 by: Bikkhu on 16 Jan 2013, 00:18 UTC reply to this comment

That shouldn't work that way. The blue shift gets the microwaves into visible spectrum closely BEFORE the speed of light is reached. The ship traveling faster than light should catch up the light from the sources behind, so stars behind the ship would be seen in front of it. Up to 2x speed of light. Just don't have any idea what would happen in speed higher than 2c.


Comment #3 by: Cyclops on 16 Jan 2013, 10:24 UTC reply to this comment

On a timeline from 'Big Bang' or Lamda - Infinity,anything moving quicker than time,as measured against lightspeed,would(according to this theory)be going backwards in time.
All things being relative,anything is possible.

However,the universe is,by nature ABSTRACT,where there are absolute extremes,like Black Holes(gravity),the speed of light,absolute temperatures of heat - cold,objects spinning at absolute speeds or extremely slow,objects(matter)orbiting at extreme speeds or infinitely slow,like the universe,perhaps.
Theoretically,as an excercise,yes,but,in the real world of physics,impossible.

The reason is simple,as matter moves relatively slowly,compared to light,the theorist have to come up with something that is capable of exceeding the speed of light.
From our knowledge,we can assume that,at the edge of the universe,are extremely high energy microwaves,which,over time,are dissipating.
Are these microwaves capable of exceeding the speed of light at extreme densities,which were possibly,part of the primordial conditions following the BB?

If inflation was capable of producing such a condition,in which microwaves were a part of the recipe of the energy mix,who can say.

We know that light never existed for some 300,000 years post BB,until first light,during which time,gravity's influence was virtually neglible.
This situation enabled the expansion to continue unabated,opening up the accelerating expansion that we see today.

Without that velocity existing during the expansion,the whole edifice may well have collapsed back in on itself(could it have done so),is that the meaning of the lower temperature concentric ring in the Cosmic Background Radiation that we see,or is it merely a phase change?

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