If we look at light as a wave, then there are "multiple reasons" why certain waves can travel faster than white (or colorless) light in a medium, de Rham said. Light exhibits both particle-like and wave-like characteristics, and can therefore be regarded as both a particle (a photon) and a wave. But there are certain caveats to consider, she said. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best."Technically, the statement 'nothing can travel faster than the speed of light' isn't quite correct by itself," at least in a non-vacuum setting, Claudia de Rham, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London, told Live Science in an email. Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.Īnd since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. One day, when humanity is not limited to a tiny fraction of the speed of light, we might travel to the stars. A few spacecraft have used solar sails to show that they work, and scientists think that a solar sail could propel spacecraft to 10% of the speed of light. These are large, thin sheets of plastic attached to a spacecraft and designed so that sunlight can push on them, like wind in a normal sail. One promising way to get something moving very fast is to use a solar sail. Scientists are researching many other ways to go fast – even warp drives, the faster-than-light travel popularized by Star Trek. Nuclear fusion, the process that powers the Sun, is also much more efficient than chemical fuel. Other methods for pushing a spacecraft involve using electric or magnetic forces. The problem is that burning fuel is very inefficient. All rockets, even the sleek new rockets used by SpaceX and Blue Origins, burn rocket fuel that isn’t very different from gasoline in a car. Yes! But engineers need to figure out new ways to make things move in space. Could humans make something go even faster? It’s possible to get something to 1% the speed of light, but it would just take an enormous amount of energy. Andrzej Mirecki via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA How fast can we go? Solar sails, the thin shiny square seen in this artist’s rendition of the Japanese IKAROS spacecraft, could propel a spacecraft to 10% the speed of light. That’s roughly the same amount of energy that 2 million people in the U.S. Making something go three times as fast requires nine times the energy, and so on.įor example, to get a teenager who weighs 110 pounds (50 kilograms) to 1% of the speed of light would cost 200 trillion Joules (a measurement of energy). To make something go twice as fast takes four times the energy. The problem is that it takes a lot of kinetic energy to increase speed. To go faster, you need to increase kinetic energy. Any object that’s moving has energy due to its motion. What’s holding humanity back from reaching 1% of the speed of light? In a word, energy. That’s blindingly fast – yet only 0.05% of the speed of light. After it launched from Earth in 2018, it skimmed the Sun’s scorching atmosphere and used the Sun’s gravity to reach 330,000 mph (535,000 kmh). The spacecraft that is traveling the fastest is NASA’s Parker Solar Probe. They use rockets to break free of the Earth’s gravity, which takes a speed of 25,000 mph (40,000 kmh). The fastest human-made objects are spacecraft. That sounds impressive, but it’s still only 0.001% the speed of light. The fastest aircraft is NASA’s X3 jet plane, with a top speed of 7,000 mph (11,200 kph). NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben The fastest things ever madeīullets can go 2,600 mph (4,200 kmh), more than three times the speed of sound. The Parker Solar Probe, seen here in an artist’s rendition, is the fastest object ever made by humans and used the gravity of the Sun to get going 0.05% the speed of light.
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