Being cooked for dinner! or What Danger of Blueshifting EM into X-rays and beyond?

When doing some research for some of the resent questions proposed, I ran across an article that pointed out a danger of traveling at extreme speeds in normal space as a high percentage of c I was unaware of. (besides just running into a few grains of sand...)

The first problem after creating some shielding to protect against projectiles, appears to be to protect against ionizing radiation. One thing I never thought of was the blue shifting issue when traveling at near light speeds. So at what speed would say blue light shift to x-ray? What speed would near infra-red shift to x-ray? and what might be an effective shielding against this much larger amount of damaging radiation? Obviously you only need it on the 'front' of the ship.

On top of that it appears that the faster one goes getting closer to the speed of light, light itself starts to push back on the object, like air-resistance on a super-sonic jet. (I just found that fascinating and wanted to share it in this question!)

@99.99995 percent c

And interestingly, the students also realized that, when traveling at such an intense speed, a ship would be subject to incredible pressure exerted by X-rays "” an effect that would push back against the ship, causing it to slow down. The researchers likened the effect to the high pressure exerted against deep-ocean submersibles exploring extreme depths. To deal with this, a spaceship would have to store extra amounts of energy to compensate for this added pressure.

posted about 10 years ago

bowlturner‭

21 reputation 27 2 2 0