question about flying a rocker ship "past a star" (not the sun) but a star, more details below?

Question

we all know that all those small stars we see in the night sky are far far away.........so how long would it take a rocket ship to fly "past" a star? would it take minutes, hours, days, weeks, months or years? how long?

Answer 1

That depends on how fast you go and whose time you are using. The closest star (not counting the sun) is proxima centauri at 4.22 light years. At near the speed of light, someone on earth would say it took 4.22 years to reach the nearest star. But in the spaceship itself, it takes almost no time at all if you travel very close to the speed of light.

Answer 2

From the orbit of the Earth, escape velocity from the Sun is around 42 km/s. This is the minimum speed you'd need to leave the solar system; any slower and you'd just wind up circling the Sun again.

So assuming your rocket thrusts up to 42 km/s, then having spent its fuel coasts freely to the nearest star 4 light-years away, it would take roughly 30,000 years to reach its destination. So the answer is neither days, weeks, months, nor years. It's not even centuries. It's millennia.

While it may be fun to speculate on whether a spacecraft traveling at n% the speed of light did this or that, it's all moot. We currently don't have engines or a fuel source that can achieve even 1% light speed. But we do have probes that have managed to break free of the Sun's gravity (i.e. Voyagers 1 and 2.)

Answer 3

A 'rocker ship'? Is that anything like a hobby horse? Or is it just that it's made in China?

Assuming that you could get your 'rocker ship' up to half the speed of light, it would take about 9 years to reach the -nearest- star.

Of course, it wouldn't be that long for you due to the time dilation (about 13%) involved with such speeds.

Doug

Answer 4

I may be wrong but I did a quick add up in my head and I come up with about 160,000 years to the nearest star in the space shuttle.. The space shuttle couldn't go there of course but if we just considered it's speed...