Interstellar Definition and 134 Threads

One of the nitpicks about Interstellar the film is the tidal wave on Miller's Planet. Miller's Planet is deep in the gravity well of a monster black hole. Lot's to unpack there but the upshot is that there's a tidal wave that sweeps around the planet shaped like a tall, very steep mountain...

Normally these clouds are quiet, but they can get excited and start emitting radio waves by some nearby source of radiation. This new paper has found several more signals, dimmer than the Wow! signal but similar in its behavior: Arecibo Wow! I: An Astrophysical Explanation for the Wow! Signal

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/ad65fc How it is reported in the media - Saturn throws comet out of solar system at 6,700 mph (10800 km/h): What astronomers think happened...

I recently saw (on a pop-sci video) an opinion that the engineering challenges involved in interstellar travel are insurmountable. One of the challenges discussed was how to protect a ship moving at, say 0.2c, from being disintegrated over time by collisions with interstellar particles. That...

Curious about the difficulties of this - everything I can find on, say reaching Proxima B with an unmanned probe deals with propulsion- but say we have something that can go 0.2C and want to put a satellite in orbit around Proxima B, can we navigate that accurately? Is the position of the...

Thought this sounded exciting, if nothing else then as possible basis for a discussion. Toward the Stars: Technological, Ethical, and Sociopolitical Dimensions of Interstellar Exploration. Regards. EDIT: Corrected link.

Alright, since I’m still stuck on my sci-fi story because I can’t exactly outline the mid-point plot twist with a realistic catastrophe on board an interstellar spaceship, I thought I’d widen the scope a little — towards full-on open brainstorming: What, if anything, can realistically go wrong...

An interesting article on some of the history of, and discoveries by, the 44+ year old Voyager spacecraft s. The bean counters originally planned a 4 year mission for Voyagers 1&2. However, the scientists and engineers involved saw a golden opportunity that wouldn't repeat for another 176...

How good are our ears / what can SETI and the like detect ? If we are listening for a radio signal broadcast by some advanced civilisation in our galaxy how sensitive would our "ears" have to be to detect a signal ? Obviously part of that equation would be how strong and how close the...

I was hoping to hear some discussion about this eventually. It is one of the biggest events in all of human history if it is true isn't it? https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/13/world/interstellar-meteor-discovery-scn/index.html

Hi all, Why not build an electron rocket? Why won't this idea work? Seems like someone could just hitch an electron gun onto a spaceship. Boom! Electron Rocket. I was thinking about ion thrusters. These use ions to achieve thrust. They are problematic for achieving a high delta V because...

Science fiction is of course full of all kind of futuristic ideas about interstellar space travel and ways of propulsion, some more physically plausible then others. But within the current realm of what is physical possible, what could interstellar space travel be like? First you need a source...

The interstellar spacecraft Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 and left the solar system to reach the endless interstellar space in 2012. It is now 2021. Voyager 1 has been sailing in space for 44 years. Why does it still have energy to send electromagnetic signals back to the earth? What does...

https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03808 They are using Boyer-Lindquist coordinates for the Kerr metric. As far as I understand they also introduced a camera-fixed basis defining spherical coordinates ##\theta_{cs}## and ##\phi_{cs}## to keep track of the directions of the light rays relative to the...

I have in mind a way to enable FTL travel. Is this way viable? In the paper: "Weighing the vacuum with the Archimedes experiment" we can see the dependency of the gravitational repulsion exerted by Casimir Vacuum on the energy between the plates. The force goes as E / c^2. In the papers...

Summary:: Hypotetical structure in the style of Dyson ring In the style of Dyson's proposal of an orbital superstructure, I wonder if in the specialized literature wasn't suggested that an evolved civilization could make a kind of orbital shutter, in order to delivery optical signals...

I have seen that interstellar dust contains the detritus of supernova explosions. But whet else does it contain? How uniform is it? Does its compositions vary significantly from place to place? This question started with wondering whether one could back out the origins of the Earth from it's...

Hi everybody, I would like to share with you a crewed interstellar spacecraft which I have designed and called Solar One. It employs a combination of 3 propulsion methods: nuclear fusion, beam-powered propulsion , and photon propulsion. Basically, several compact fusion reactors power a...

So in a setting with interstellar travel I was thinking about interstellar trade. I know the method of travel dicates what is traded, so I will elaborate below: Constant Acceleration: Refueling is virtually not a concern. Stargates: Ships can accelerate for months to reach just bellow...

With voyager 2 now going to interstella space what have we learned?

n = 11000 because n = N/V and V = 1m^3. Using P = nRT/V I get that P = 7.32x10^6 Pa. considering that the gas is in a high vacuum, this value seems far too high to be true. Please help?

In 2017 the intriguing Oumaouma object was determined to have reached us from interstellar space. Now another object, this time larger and likely a comet, has been identified, apparently from outwith the system. More here on the BBC site and The Minor Planet centre. Unlike its predecessor...

Summary: Can an interstellar planet be hot enough to heat it's terrestrial moon without igniting fusion? I am a science fiction writer, however I am studying astrophysics to better captivate audiences with real and believable plots, The idea in question is an interstellar sub brown dwarf gas...

We know interstellar space and intergalatic space is not empty. Couldn't small dust particles block the light of distant galaxys?

When an object is propelled from a solar system, does that object sometimes travel in a curve depending on the direction it travels away from the solar system, relative to the direction the solar system is traveling and to some fixed point in space. And if it enters a second solar system, that...

I read in a so called sci-fi website from my country that as the universe is expanding we may not be able to get to certain galaxies in a possible interstellar travel. That information seems ok for me. But then there was a comment by a reader concluding from the website post that there is coming...

So, let me preface by saying I’m neither a scientist nor a mathematician, so am requesting some talented help here checking the accuracy of my source information and math. Regarding star formation, I got curious about how much volume of space in the interstellar medium is actually required to...

We all know that getting too close to the gravity well of a massive object like a black hole causes time to move more slowly for you than it would for people on Earth. But is it possible for a planet to exist close enough to a black hole and have a person actually stand on that planet? And if...

I hope this is the right forum for this question. Imagine alien tech allows them to travel 1 million light years to Earth instantaneously. No thrust, vector, propulsion was involved. They didn't have to approach the speed of light, with its attendant increase in mass. Having arrived at earth, in...

From Pirx´s Tale: What actually was found inside the swarm, though: But the conclusion was: No evidence whatever, in short. The Earth of Pirx´ Tale could not spot a dead ship - an asteroid-like object - at a distance of 400 million km. It was only through chance presence of a spaceship...

The first asteroid ever seen from another solar system is whizzing through our own, and astronomers are racing to observe the visitor before it slips away. Links: Nature http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/astronomers-spot-first-known-interstellar-comet/

Lets suppose that in SF universe, due to hyperspace, travel between stars don't require planet killer energies. A mothership can transport kilotons of goods with energy of a few Tsar bombs, travel takes months. What could be valuable enough to transport between star systems? Are there solar...

Despite its flaws I find the empire in The Mote in God's Eye timeline to be very effective. Doesn't get too much in the way, but is ruthless about maintaining order. "Istvan Dies", for example, tells the story of a planet that is slagged to bedrock when it rebels and won't surrender...

So, I have been thinking about TRAPPIST-1 and how far away that system is from us. It is 40ly away from Earth, according to our frame of reference. This is often put in a way that makes one think that even at speeds close to that of light, it will take almost 40 years to get there. The muons in...

Hi guys, I am writing an undergraduate screenplay about physicist. The physicist is working on a mission with the aim to fly a spaceship with human crew to an extremely distant planet with an environment suitable for humans. Its really not that important for the story, because the film is...

I understand that the interstellar medium (ISM) consists mostly of neutral hydrogen gas, plus a smaller fraction of helium gas. Furthermore, I gather that between 0.1 and 1.0 atoms per cm3 correspond to the average density values pertaining in our "Local Bubble". The above, however, refers...

Let's say we already colonized some of the planets and moons in our solar system. Mars,Moon, Europa and etc. Planets like Mars and other has less gravity than earth, so the resource needed for space travel in our solar system will reduce by a lot if we launch spaceships there. Say, that we...

Dear community, I have no formal education in physics, but I think I have understood some of the basic concepts and ideas in SRT. I am currently trying to find a solution to a problem that came up during my reading of Joe Haldeman's "The Forever War", a Sci-Fi novel that deals with the impact of...

Given: original project Orion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) My idea is the addition of a centrifugal couch to regulate gravity to crew during the acceleration and deceleration phases of the trip. The Orion concept, for an interstellar ark concept, relies on...

In 1974 we sent a signal out towards a cluster of stars 25,000 light years away at a power of 1000kW. If we had been on the receiving end of that signal, would we have been able to detect it? Basically if you could have two identical Arecibo observatories, what's the maximum range in which...

Hello everyone, what a fantastic community this is. I was hoping someone here could help me calculate the speed required to reach a certain distance in a certain amount of time. How fast will Object X be moving if it clears 28,163,529 kilometers in 0.0001 microseconds. We are looking for the...

I hope putting this in the high energy section is the right section (if not, please let me know which would be more appropriate!) I felt this was appropriate since the work I am doing is high energy astrophysics. So I'm doing some research this summer, and my tasks were to take some data...

Ok, so I know I'm missing something here. But, you know how pool balls that rotate opposite direction increase the speed of one of them through kinetic transfer? Why don't we build a launch platform based on this approach and use the orbital spin of the Sun, Jupiter, and Saturn (gaining speed...

Two questions: 1. What tools and techniques are typically used to determine and plot spatial distributions of compounds--particularly organic ones--in interstellar dust? 2. Is it presently possible to determine distributions of compounds along arcs distant from the galactic center? If so, can...

Hi Folks, What is your opinion on this article? It suggest that interstellar travel is a fantasy. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/interstellar-travel-as-delusional-fantasy-excerpt/# Yet, I read articles about institutions like NASA investing in various conceptual propulsion...

I was watching recently that PBS Space Video on youtube about space propulsion and it got me thinking about Project Orion again. They talk about sending humans to another star system, but would it not be spectacular enough to send probe? The probe could scan and photograph planets there and...

I always ask myself this question, and I think it is better to ask people that really know about this. Due to the impossibilities that Special Relativity poses, such as any object with mass not being able to travel at the speed of light. If we don't manage to at least scratch that speed, I...

There are lots of sci-fi settings in which Mankind has become an interstellar civilization and lives on numerous planets throughout its galaxy. However, if the fastest we can communicate is at the speed of light, we will have to wait ages to receive a message between planets. Does this mean...

I am new to this forum and don't quite know if these types of questions are appreciated here or not but i have a question about the use of wormhole in the interstellar movie. We saw that they used the wormhole to travel to a distant place on the universe. When the main characters went to the...

RocketShip, yep that's the name I was given ironically enough. I'm not much for math but I love philosophy and critical thinking. I'll come up with ideas you come up with solutions :P my biggest interest at the moment is how to get the masses into space.