Ask an Astronomer a question: http://curious.astro.cornell.e

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Hey Every one,<br /><br />I just thought you all should know that Cornell university have a great online service where astromy Ph D's will answer any of your questions as long as you follow the guidelines they set.<br /><br />I asked a question last week and they answered me very thoroughly.<br /><br />This is their web site:<br />http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/<br /><br /><br />These are the questions and answers:<br /><br />1. Theoretically, How fast could a ship go in space? Forget about what pushes it. I just want to know know how fast it could go in space if nothing got in it's way.<br /><br />a. Answer: just under the speed the light<br /><br />2. Assuming there was NOTHING but space in front or around a man made space ship. Would the Ship feel any kind of stress from MASSIVE amounts of speed?<br /><br />a. Answer: No..it'd only feel stresses from its own acceleration to get up to<br />that speed.<br /><br />3. Can Sound or strong vibrations have any effect in Space?<br /><br />a. Answer: yes, why not?<br /><br />4. The reasons for these precise questions:<br />The way I understand space so far is that if you could "push" an object (Say a pencil) to go about 1 MPH, the pencil would NEVER slow down or stop unless it was affected by some thing on the way. <br /><br />If you push the pencil AGAIN with EXACTLY the same force as you did the first time (As the pencil is still moving) the pencil will go 1 MPH faster and so on. So if you pushed the pencil 10,000,000 times the pencilshould travel at a speed of 10,000,000 MPH. <br />Is that correct? Because if it is we only need to figure out a way to make a reaction in space based<br /><br />a. Uhm, no that's not correct. What you're describing is Newtonian Physics<br />which is just an approximation and is only applicable in the sort of<br />everyday Earth-bound experience. The special theory of relativity shows<br />us that if you push a pencil hard enough to accelerate it to 1MPH and<</safety_wrapper>