- #1
Xaspire88
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A starship Voyages to a distant planet 10 ly away. The explorers stay 1 yr, return at the same speed, and arrive back on Earth 26 yr after they left. Assume that the time needed to accelerate and decelerate is negligible.
a) What is the speed of the starship?
b) How much time has elapsed on the astronauts' chronometers?
At first this seemed very straight forward and I thought i would have no problems with it.
I started off using the equation
[tex]\Delta t = \frac{\Delta t^1}{\sqrt{1 - v^2/c^2}}[/tex]
The [tex]\Delta t [/tex] for this problem should be 25 years since that is the amount of time spent traveling, or at least it would seem to me you would not count the 1 yr they spent on the other planet. But once I arrived at this point i was still missing one variable necessary to complete the problem. One being the speed of the starship(which needed to be found), and the other was the [tex]\Delta t^1 [/tex] (which also needed to be found). I can not find out how to solve this problem without one of those variables. Help please
a) What is the speed of the starship?
b) How much time has elapsed on the astronauts' chronometers?
At first this seemed very straight forward and I thought i would have no problems with it.
I started off using the equation
[tex]\Delta t = \frac{\Delta t^1}{\sqrt{1 - v^2/c^2}}[/tex]
The [tex]\Delta t [/tex] for this problem should be 25 years since that is the amount of time spent traveling, or at least it would seem to me you would not count the 1 yr they spent on the other planet. But once I arrived at this point i was still missing one variable necessary to complete the problem. One being the speed of the starship(which needed to be found), and the other was the [tex]\Delta t^1 [/tex] (which also needed to be found). I can not find out how to solve this problem without one of those variables. Help please