I was wundering if anybody new the answer to this the questions been on my mind for a while now.

We all know that light is fast 299 792 458 m / s to be exact, if Earth built a space craft that could travel at this speed, and we flew towards a star or galaxy, would the light from that star/galaxy be absorbed faster, and would we see it changing (spinning)faster than if travelling towards it at the half the speed of light, or would we see it the same no matter what speed we went at towards it?

Just wonderin

Not sure on all that malarkey, I think that as the speed of light (thought a vacuum!) is constant then the frequency must compress or expand, Red-Shift seems to be often mentioned if stars are moving away from us, and you can use the amount of shift (providing you know what it started out at!) to determine how fast it is moving away..

To if your speed increased then the frequency would also increase and eventually you would not see visible light any more, you would move up in the spectrum and hit ultraviolet and beyond..

There is some theory or whatnot by some obscure bloke, goes by the name of Albert, that would give you the answers, it you could only make sense of it!

I'm sure someone with a better understanding could explain it a lot better!

is quite complicated, it'll take a while to sink in!

Cheers!

Time is relative to the speed travelled therefore the closer to the speed of light the quicker time seems to pass.
Someone able to travel at the speed of light would travel light years in seconds whereas time to those on a planet would pass in the number of light years the person has travelled.
Lthough nothing is supposed tobe able to travel faster than light, theoretically tachyons do not travel below the speed of light and have no top speed.
It has been suggested that a proton powered craft would eventually reach light speed and that tachyons could then be used to power a different propulsion system to move the craft at limitless speed.

The theories of space travel are endless, only tempered by the power of imagination and the engineering science & knowledge at the time.
The first powered flight was only 100 years ago yet already man has sent voyager beyond the solar system.
Just think what could be achieved in the next couple of hundred years at the rate that knowledge has been aquired since the industrial revolution.

The speed of light is indeed constant in a vacuum, however, the speed of light does slow down depending on the density of the medium it travels through. In a Bose-Einstein condensates scientists have slowed light to a crawl.

As for faster than light travel, there are problems, first the space vehicle would gain inertial mass, in other words it would become heavier the faster it travelled. At the speed of light the mass would be infinite. The second problem as already mentioned is ‘time dilation’ time slows down and stops completely at light speed.

All is not lost though; we may be able to travel faster than light speed by cheating. Frame dragging is one example, rather than accelerating the vehicle you accelerate the space around it instead. Like a coffee bean floating in a cup, stir the coffee and it’s the coffee that moves instead of the bean.

M-Theory takes the possibility of extra dimensions very seriously, in fact it’s about the only way we can really explain the weirdness of the quantum world. M-Theory postulates the existence of bubble universes floating in higher dimensional space [hyperspace] Who knows, one day we may be able to vanish into hyper space and reappear at our destination instantly.

Wormhole travel and warp drive are also not forbidden by the laws of physics, just difficult to achieve.

quote:

Just think what could be achieved in the next couple of hundred years at the rate that knowledge has been acquired since the industrial revolution.

Ha, by then we will all be living in mud huts again!
the oil will have run out, the air will be foul, the sea will be no better off either! most of population of earth will have starved to death or died of some plague or whatnot!

but don't worry, there will still be Microsoft, although they will be making the mud for the huts by then....

Hi Jamie,
You are right.
Relativity has nothing to do with this problem.
Although when you approach the speed of light, things get strange, you can actually just consider the problem at normal speeds from a very simple point of view:
When you are stationary two light years away from the star you are looking at light that is two years old. When you are stationary as close as you can get to the star you are looking at light that is seconds old. If the star rotates ten times a year, then from a distance of two light years, you are seeing the sun 20 revolutions ago. When you travel towards the star you must catch up those 20 revolutions, from two years ago to present ( plus any others that happened while you were travelling). In other words you must see the star rotating faster, even if it is only by a tiny amount.

It gets more complicated as you approach the star with greater speed, but I am fairly sure that it makes no difference. Although your time slows down, you also see a contraction of the space between the photons which cancels out the effect of relativity - in other words you still see the star rotating faster.