What would happen if a spaceship going the speed of light hit a feather in space?

Question

What would happen if a spaceship going the speed of light hit a feather in space?

Answer 1

Hey, JLiam, the bullets from a .9mm pistol have a much lower "relative mass" than your car.... certainly you wouldn't want to collide with one of them while driving down the street?

The feather only weighs a fraction of a bullet, but the relative speed between a lightspeed ship and a feather is vastly greater. The feather would destroy the space ship. (the feather would be destroyed in the collision as well if that's any consolation)

Not only feather-sized objects would be problematic. A grain of sand would be devastating as well. This is one of the major obstacles to light-speed travel through space, to speak nothing of the whole time dilation effect.

To give you an idea - say the feather is 1 gram in mass - .001kg. Kinetic Energy (Ke) = 1/2 the mass (m) times the velocity (v) squared.

Ke=1/2mv^2

speed of light = 3x10^8m/sec. (300000000m/sec)

speed of light^2 = 9x10^16 (9 with sixteen zeroes)

multiply by .001 --> 9x10^13

half of that is 4.5x10^13.

So the energy of the motion of the feather, relative to the space ship is 45,000,000,000,000 (45 thousand trillion) joules. That's twelve million kilowatt hours!

It's enough energy to run 120 million 100-watt lightbulbs for an hour! Imagine that being delivered into your ship almost instantaneously! Of course, if the feather punched right through the ship (the most likely case) a lot less than this would be transferred into your ship (actually, out of your ship into the feather, since it's what's actually sitting still), but it's definitely a bad day for you if you hit that feather!

Of course the numbers are probably way too low since I'm not accounting for relativity.

Answer 2

If they even noticed, someone would be asking "How did a feather get from Earth all the way out here into space?"

Answer 3

The space shuttle goes far less than the speed of light, yet tiny particles (smaller than the mass of a feather) still do damage to the shuttle.

Answer 4

Actually,. assuming that the space ship was still solid matter at that speed, there would be a rather large collision.

As you travel faster any impacts you have become more energetic. (Basically think of it as the faster a baseball is thrown the more it hurts.) So when you are going the speed of light relative to a feather and hit the feather there will be an energetic collision. How energetic? There are formulas out there that you can use to figure it out. I don't remember where they are but I have used them myself. or you could e-mail your local universities astronomy professor or physics professor.

ETA: 1 kilogram of material traveling at 0.1 percent of the speed of light hitting a stationary object would release about the same amount of energy as 213 sticks of dinamite.

Answer 5

Technically speaking, regardless what the speed the spaceship is travelling, the feather has a 'relative' mass that is less than the spaceship hence nothing will happen to the spaceship.

Post in Reply to 'me':

For the spaceship to be damaged the Kinetic Energy (KE) absorbed by the Spaceship needs to be greater than the KE of the feather.

Remember that KE = 0.5 x m x v^2 where:

  KE - Kinetic Energy

  m - Mass

  v - Velocity

  ^2 - squared

This is where mass comes into the equation - even if the feather is traveling at the speed of light also... KE(feather) will still be less that of the Spaceship.