I dont get how they could have used solar sails and get all the way there. Wouldnt it take lifetimes being lightyears away?
Wasn’t there an episode where Sisko and son showed how they did it ala the Kon Tiki?
Yes but it was a solar sail ship… Those things are not that fast right?
Wooooooorrrrrmmmmmhhhhhoooolllllleeeeee … !
Stars are not evenly distributed, and some can be very close indeed.
According to memory alpha, it was a tachyon eddy - not the same term as a wormhole, but something close - a faster-than-light subspace phenomenon that ‘blew’ the ship off course at warp speeds. It could probably have happened about as easily to a chunk of rock, though the fact that a lightship was so spread out just might have helped it ‘catch and ride the eddy’
But it was nothing to do with real solar sail technology.
Leading to the question, “How is it that they were accelerated to light speed in a matter of seconds and didn’t end up as chunky salsa on the aft bulkhead?”
Maybe Sisko installed an inertial damping field along with the artificial gravity as a precaution?
Man, Okuda really should have trademarked that chunky salsa line. I see it everywhere. 
I think that if warp is anything to go by, subspace phenomena generally don’t involve a sensation of acceleration. Sort of the ‘we stand still and the rest of the universe worries about moving the other way’ principle 
(Yes, that’s at least half a fanwank.)
A wizard did it.
Without some Star Trek techno-babble, you’re correct. A solar sail-powered craft accelerates rather slowly. However, you * can * get it up to a respectable fraction of light speed by aiming a monstrous laser at it. Of course, you have to pump a respectable fraction of a sun’s annual output into that laser to get enough energy to do so. So, assuming you have your spaceship traveling at some large fraction of C, you could cover interstellar distances in considerably less than a lifetime. But without an equivalently monstrous laser to decelerate you, you better not have much interest in playing tourist in any solar system you happen to pass through.
Did they have a deflector shield on board? Maybe they routed something through it.
Like air coming out of a balloon!
Bottom line is that it couldn’t, but Star Trek, like a lot of other scifi, plays fast and loose with interstellar distances.
Like the old Romulan sublight ships. Or the fact that Bajor to Earth was something like a 3 month trip at the beginning of DS9, but a regular occurance by the end of the show.
As I recall, the entire premise was so silly I neither paid attention or made up my usual Trek Excuses.
They took a shortcut through Jeffrey’s tube!
Bad line anyway.
If you didn’t have some way of counteracting innertia, “chunky salsa” is really a poor description of what you’d end up as if you accelerated to the kind of speeds they’re talking about. There’d be no way to distinguish between what used to be your molecules and the matter that made up whatever part of the ship was behind you.
So more like homogenized milk, then?
Still overchunked.
Superheated plasma.
Bajoran light ships were equipped with a spare polarity that could be reversed in case of emergency.