Seeing shapes at the Speed of light?

Question

I know traveling at light speed in impossible today and probably forever. I'm also speaking hypothetically. As far as red and blue shift, thats only if the object the camera is trying to see is moving transversly, right? Well, what if the object is moving lateral to the camera at only speeds we are currently capable of? Or even if it were standing still. Would that camera be able to see and record that stationary object?

Answer 1

A distant object can appear to travel faster than the speed of light across our line of sight, provided that it has some component of motion towards us as well as perpendicular to our line of sight.The effect has been observed in the radio emissions from jets of quasars which are thought to travel close to the speed of light in a direction near to our line of sight

See the diagram at the website below

Answer 2

If something is moving faster than the speed of light, then we call that a tachyon (something that probably doesn't exist).  It has an imaginary mass and can't interact with regular matter in any way we know of, so you most certainly aren't going to see it the regular way.

Answer 3

It would depend on the relative motion between the camera and the object. If the object is approaching the camera, there would be a doppler effect resulting in a blue shift. If the camera and object are separating there would be a red shift.  You are right, the light from the object must strike the film or Charge Coupled Device, CCD, with sufficient intensity and within the bandwidth that the film or CCD can detect.

If the object is moving across your field of view, you would probably detect a blur if the camera response is fast enough. Peace, Bob

Answer 4

Since travel at or faster than the speed of light is impossible, your question is completely meaningless.

sort of like asking how far away Japan is if the earth is flat.

Or which is the best perpetual motion machine to buy.

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Answer 5

Let's start with the fact that you can't travel at or faster than the speed of light.  Having said that, consider floating out in space an looking at a distant star.  The light you see left that star a long time ago - could be millions of years eariler depending onhow far away the star is.

Now start moving toward the star with a constant acceleration.  As your speed increases, you notice that the spectrum (the colors contained in the star light), becomes more and more blue.  In fact, as you get to very high speed, the spectrum goes into the ultraviolet , x-ray and gamma ray region oft eh electromagnetic spectrum.  This called a blue shift and it is due to the relativistic Doppler effect (if we had moved away from the star, the light would have been red shifted - moving from teh visible into the infrared, microwave and radio frequency parts of the spectrum).  So you would still see objects, only the "light" that you see might really have been from a different part of the spectrum due to Doppler shifting.

You could argue that moving faster than the speed of just shifts everything to either really high energy photons (really energetic gamma rays) or really low energy ones (almost DC or zero energy values).  I haven't worked the math to say that it holds up so I won't commit to this argument, but if it is true, tehn you'd still see things, but you may need gamma ray detectors or ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) equipment to do it .