the speed of light is 3x10 5 km s. A star 4.3 light years away. If you have a spacecraft which travels 500 km h, how long would it take you to get from earth to the solar system
Answers
One light year is the distance traveled by light in 1 year.
Speed of light = 3 × 10⁸ m/s
= 3 × 10⁸ km/hr × 18/5
= 54/5 × 10⁸ km/hr
= 10.8 × 10⁸ km/hr
In 1 hr , it travels 10.8× 10⁸ km .
In 1 year , there are 24 × 365 hrs
= 8760 hrs
So light travels 8760 × 10.8 ×10⁸ km in 1 year.
Distance of 1 light year = 94608 × 10⁸ km
= 94.608 × 10¹¹ km
Now distance of 4.3 light years means :
94.608 × 10¹¹ km × 4.3
= 406.814 × 10¹¹ km
Distance = 40.681 × 10¹² km .
Speed = 500 km/hr
Speed = distance / time
= > time = distance / speed
= 40.861 × 10¹² / 500 hr
= 0.8136 × 10¹² hr
= 8.136 × 10¹⁰ hr
ANSWER:
8.136 × 10¹⁰ hours will be taken .
Explanation:
Outer space is big. Really, really, really big. And that’s why NASA has no plans at present to send a spacecraft to any of the several thousand known planets beyond our solar system. Meanwhile, with respect to star travel, NASA isn’t the only game in town anymore. In April 2016, Russian high-tech billionaire Yuri Milner announced a new and ambitious initiative called Breakthrough Starshot, which intends to pour $100 million into proof-of-concept studies for an entirely new technology for star travel, aimed at unmanned space flight at 20% of light speed, with the goal of reaching the Alpha Centauri system – and, presumably, its newly discovered planet Proxima b – within 20 years. Is it possible? No one knows yet, but Alpha Centauri is an obvious target. It’s the nearest star system to our sun at 4.3 light-years away. That’s about 25 trillion miles (40 trillion km) away from Earth – nearly 300,000 times the distance from the Earth to the sun. Follow the links below to learn more about why star travel is so formidable, and about how we might accomplish it.