Can you exceed the speed of light?

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

If you have long been interested in the question of whether it is possible to exceed the speed of light, we are ready to answer it. Spoiler alert: You won't be able to accelerate your body to such limits.

The general answer to the question posed would be: yes, you can exceed the speed of light. And this will be done by our Universe by itself. It is quite difficult to understand this process, so we will start from the very beginning. Literally - from the moment of the Big Bang.

The Big Bang happened about 14 billion years ago. As a result, particles of matter began to move throughout the Universe - the explosive force scatters galaxies in all directions. And this continues to this day. This can be judged by a number of signs. The main one is the presence of the Doppler effect. In other words, today we are picking up waves of light from other galaxies in the same way that one can hear the distant sound of an ambulance siren passing by.

Take the Hydra cluster of galaxies as an example. It is located about three billion light-years away from us. We know this because astronomers have studied the spectrum of light waves emanating from Hydra. If we expand it through a prism, then we will see how much these light waves differ from the usual ones. Typically, the spectrum consists of red, green, blue, and purple. But due to the fact that the light waves had to travel a huge distance, stretch and overcome obstacles, we can observe the phenomenon of "redshift".

The Hydra Cluster is not unique in this redshift. Many other distant galaxies show the same effect. And it will only intensify - after all, since the Big Bang, our Universe has not stopped moving and continues to expand.

There is no limit to how fast the universe will expand. Therefore, Einstein's theory that nothing can move faster than the speed of light in a vacuum is still correct. The point is only that galaxies are not moving through space, but space itself is expanding and stretching. Some of the clusters are moving away from us so quickly and at such great distances that light from them will never reach Earth.

Imagine you are running a marathon. And suddenly the road itself begins to stretch and widen, and so quickly that the end of this race can not be seen.

Based on materials from Popular Science.