We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best. 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. But in an experiment in Princeton, N.J., physicists sent a. Other methods for pushing a spacecraft involve using electric or magnetic forces. For generations, physicists believed there is nothing faster than light moving through a vacuum - a speed of 186,000 miles per second. 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? Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity states that light travels so fast, in a vacuum, nothing in the universe is capable of moving faster. 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. An artist's impression of beams 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.
#The thing about being faster than light free#
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. Updated May 25, 2020, by Scoot Allan: When a hero makes the claim that they are the fastest, fans and other fast heroes will automatically begin the age-old debate of who is actually faster, with heroes like Flash and Superman even racing periodically to find out.Īnd with new speedy additions arriving in the comics and movies all the time, the list of fast superheroes continues to grow.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. With that, here’s a look at the ten fastest superheroes.
Several of these characters are part of the DC Universe, but Marvel has some speedsters, too.
At least for today, let’s focus on the fastest heroes instead. They can travel faster than once thought possible for mortals. RELATED: Kiss, Marry, Kill: Marvel Superheroes Edition Other heroes are known for their speed, and some characters are known for both skills.
Since the advent of superheroes, one debate, among others, has never been settled: is super-strength better than superspeed, or is it the other way around? Plenty of heroes make a name for themselves based on their sheer might. Radio waves are being used in current studies of the upper atmosphere to de termine the electron density of the ionosphere.
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