What would a star look like if you were traveling towards it moving faster than light?

We can pretend the star is Sirius.What would a star look like if you were traveling towards it moving faster than light?It would look like a starWhat would a star look like if you were traveling towards it moving faster than light?
%26gt;What would a star look like if you were traveling towards it moving faster than light?



You can't move faster than light. Reaching the speed of light in the first place requires infinite energy and distorts space and time to zero. You can't move towards something at the speed of light, because by the time you've reached the speed of light, you are already AT the object you were traveling towards, which in turn would already have passed through eternity and long since decayed into residual energy spread across infinite space.



It has been proposed for there to be particles called 'tachyons' which always move faster than light. The existence of tachyons violates none of the rules of relativity. However, not only would tachyons act as if they were traveling backwards in time, it is not clear how we could ever interact with them, much less convert tardyons to tachyons and vice versa.



%26gt;Or we can say what would be the difference in perception if you were moving at 10% the speed of light then started moving 99% the speed of light.



Several things happen for an object moving close to the speed of light. People outside see the object as becoming shorter from front to back, gaining mass, and experiencing time more slowly. The object itself sees the rest of the Universe as being compressed in its own direction of travel, and experiencing time more slowly. One effect would be that light from objects ahead of you would be blueshifted and that from objects behind you redshifted. That doesn't necessarily mean that they will visibly change color significantly, but they will change in visible brightness, and a spectrographic device could measure the shift in emission/absorption lines. Also, although an object directly ahead of you would stay directly ahead and an object directly behind would stay directly behind, other objects would appear to be distorted and shifted towards a ring surrounding you and oriented perpendicular to your direction of travel. And of course, your journey would appear to take a shorter amount of time than someone outside would perceive it. This last effect is actually fairly important, since it implies that even very long journeys could theoretically be made within a human lifetime, provided you had a sufficiently effective spaceship drive.What would a star look like if you were traveling towards it moving faster than light?If you were traveling at exactly the speed of light (I know, but let's just play along), then you would perceive the time, from "here" (wherever that is) to "there" to be exactly zero. Since the speed of light is finite from any frame of reference, then the distance (speed * time) from "here" to "there", for you, would be exactly zero.



Our brains work at a rate of (at best) 20 Hz, that means that at least 1/20 of a second must elapse before your brain has any idea of any change. But, 1/20 of a second after pressing the magic button, you have (obviously) already passed the distance of zero, separating you from any object we know.



Imagine if you were traveling even faster than this speed allowing you to be anywhere in zero seconds...What would a star look like if you were traveling towards it moving faster than light?
Think it might depend on the distance you were from it but I think it would just be the same as if you were traveling at it slower. It would just be getting bigger faster as you would be moving toward it faster.



I have to wonder about Einsteins theory on this. Light travels as photons. We are not photons so if we were to travel faster then light would the time problem still exist.?What would a star look like if you were traveling towards it moving faster than light?Your question is moot. You cannot travel "faster than the speed of light"...too many paradoxes.



You only get interesting answers if you ask about SIGNIFICANT FRACTIONS of the speed of light...not AT or faster than the speed of light.





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OK, now that you ask more educatedly ... did you know there is something called the Doppler effect? In astronomy, often called red shift and blue shift?



And the Doppler effect is true for all wave types.



When a light source approaches an observer, its light is blue shifted, since its frequency is increased by observing waves faster than otherwise would if the source were stationary.



The opposite happens when a light source recedes from an observer, and the light is redshifted.





Crunching the numbers, Sirius's peak frequency is in the ultraviolet, at about 1 Petahertz.



If you peceive Sirius approaching you, this peak frequency will be blue shifted. For Sirius, and that speed value you gave me, that would result in 20 Exahertz, which is in the X-ray spectrum. This could eventually be quite dangerous if it becomes bright enough.



The only portion of Sirius's black body spectrum you could then see would be its low frequency end, and very dim...because you are likely only seeing about 1% of its emission as visible...compared to the 30% which you ordinarily see.
As I have traveled many time though the universe looking at stars and other worlds, I can tell you that the STAR would look like a Star traveling toward you at faster than the speed of light.

For your information it is impossible to travel faster that the speed of light.What would a star look like if you were traveling towards it moving faster than light?
It would look like a little point of light until you got really, really close to it. It wouldn't matter how fast you're moving. But you can't move faster than light in a vacuum; as you approach the speed of light, time stops for you.
If you were traveling faster than c relative to Sirius, then Special Relativity would be falsified, and without a valid theory of motion, we would have no theoretical basis to tell you what it would look like.What would a star look like if you were traveling towards it moving faster than light?
If you wanna go faster than the speed of light, you need to create a ripple in the fabric of space-time. This could cause you to go backwards in time. But the star would appear as normal
Really flaming bright.