To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope (launched April 24 1990), NASA released yet another incredible image along with a very cool animated 3D fly-through video. Link to space.com article
The video reminded me of the viewing screen on the bridge of the star ship Enterprise when it is zooming through space at warp speed on Star Trek, with all the stars whizzing past as if they’re coming from a central point directly in front of the viewer.
I’ve always thought that such a perspective was impossible (at least in open space) due to the enormous distances between the stars- a bright star near the center of my field of vision might be a million light-years away while a dimmer star in my peripheral vision might be half that, and a star that looks like it’s between the two might actually be two million light-years away.
The NASA video shows a star cluster where the stars are much closer together. So my first question is this: is the perspective shown in the NASA video accurate? I assume the folks at NASA would strive for accuracy. Are the stars in the cluster close enough together to allow such a view? What about the stars near the center of a galaxy; are they close enough together? Let’s assume faster-than-light travel is possible, since the video makes the trip in less than two minutes.
And if there really was an Enterprise capable of “warp speed” what would Captain Kirk see on the screen while flying through space? Let’s say the Enterprise is in the outer reaches of a galaxy or between galaxies where the stars are very far apart. I think most of the stars would remain stationary with an occasional star whizzing past. Of course the tunnel effect looks better on TV and gives a better sense of speed.
Don’t have an answer, just wanted to say that I’ve been meaning to ask this very question regarding the now cliche *Star Trek *view-screen shot. Given their distances from each other vs their concentration in the galaxy (and for now assuming non-relativistic Star Trek-type FTL travel), would the standard one-point perspective moving star field view ever be remotely realistic?
NASA is also a federal agency. It has developed a unique marketing program for itself to sell to its shareholders (the American People) who in turn put pressure on the Board of Directors and CEO (Congress and the President) for funding of its programs. So they take a bit of liberty. Are you going to tell a five year old child the Moon really isn’t made of green cheese and deal with the wrath of a parent whose child is now crying because of your insistence on absolute accuracy?
The kid in me loved it. The The scientist in me understands the reality. The adult in me understands the politics behind it. Win all around.
Yeah, the ‘distances significantly compressed’ part makes me think that nowhere in the galaxy are stars even remotely close enough to each other to where the ‘moving star field’ view would ever happen. The adult in me kind of suspected that.
I did some research on Westerlund 2 (the star cluster in the video) and according to this page, also by the Space Telescope Science Institute, it is approx. 6 to 13 light-years across and contains about 3,000 stars.
So even if the Enterprise was traveling 6 times the speed of light it would take at least a year to go through the cluster. I don’t know how fast warp speed is, however.
Edit: Oops, at 6 times the speed of light it would only take a couple of months to make the trip.
There is no “banana for scale”… Except you are deriving scale from the diameter of each star… well I guess if you ignore the diameter, then its like that .
If you say the diameter is accurate, then the distances between are compressed.
But if you say the distances between stars are accurate, then the size and brightness of stars is wrong.
I suppose they want to say the brightness and shapes and appearance of the stars and clouds is somewhat accurate, but the distances are way off.
Please fight my ignorance, but I understand it, in the real world the distances between stars would approach zero as you approach the speed of light, so ignoring “warp speed” couldn’t the Star Trek view be correct at some speed approaching the speed of light?
The OP has a somewhat inaccurate idea of the distances between stars. No star you can see in the sky is ‘a million light years away’; the most distant star most of us will ever see is Deneb, about 3000 ly away, and most stars that are visible in the sky are between 4 light years and 1000 ly. When you look at a cluster (as Bumbershoot points out) the stars in that cluster are just a few light years apart.
I don’t think that FTL travel is possible, and if it were you probably wouldn’t be able to see any stars directly while travelling. Perhaps they would look bizarre in some indefinable way, depending on how your FTL drive works, but this is all just imaginary. So I think this video can only really be regarded as a simulation - or possibly a series of snapshops taked many centuries apart by a slow-moving spacecraft (no- that doesn’t work either- if this were a time-lapse movie you’d see the stars and nebulae moving over time).
I’ve tried out many different 3D visualizations of the galactic environment, and that strikes me as a pretty good one; it probably doesn’t represent what Captain Kirk would actually see if he were looking out the window of his FTL ship (which may very well be nothing) but it might be something like the sort of simulation software he might use to map his environment in real time.
Yet another thing to consider is that Westerlund 2 is too far away to allow absolute accuracy when mapping the star positions and the 3D shape of the nebula; this model is a good guess, but nothing more.
Thanks for the reply, eburacum45. When I said one star might be a million light-years away while another might be half that and a third star might be twice that, I was trying to illustrate my point that a perspective like that shown on the Enterprise’s view-screen was impossible. I was talking about the view that Captain Kirk might see, not what we see from here on Earth.
The tunnel effect we see on Star Trek is inaccurate because the stars wouldn’t actually originate from a central point. The most distant stars aren’t necessarily in the middle of our field of vision. As you say, Captain Kirk might actually see nothing. Or he might see an occasional star whizzing past.
And you’re right, it is all imaginary. There’s no way to know what one might see while zooming through space at warp factor 7. But it’s something I’ve always wondered about and the NASA video was a good excuse to post my question.
And as I said in post #5, after googling around I found out that the “distances within the model are significantly compressed.”
I’ve just visited Westerlund 2 in the space visualisation program Space Engine; this program includes a lot of procedurally generated stars (although you can turn them off), but does not include the nebulosity from this video. Since it is a free program I’d be surprised if it did.
To replicate the sort of movement in that video I had to set the speed of travel at more than a parsec per second, so the imaginary camera must be moving pretty fast.
If you completely ignore relativity and assume the speed of light is infinite and you make the ship go fast enough, then you correctly get the Star-Trek style visual effect.
The stars can be modeled as more or less a very diffuse gas with thinner & thicker areas. If you travel fast enough through that, again with the caveats above, the result is the perspective of a denser cloud straight ahead and things whizzing by on both sides.
As **eburacum45 **just said though, you need truly ludicrous speed to be passing stars with any frequency. e.g. if you’re traveling along a line of stars 10 ly apart and they’re going by at a rate of one every half second you’ve got to be doing 20 ly/sec or 35 million times the actual speed of light.
And it’s pure fantasy to discuss what that “looks like” in the real world with relativity and light traveling at the very finite c versus the distances involved between the incredibly diffuse “gas” of stars.
Late add: When we fly at 200-300mph through rain or snow it looks just like Star Trek’s viewscreen. For all practical purposes the rain / snow is a diffuse “gas” of stationary points as we’re blasting through the “gas.”
It looks like looking down the barrel of a fire hose or some such. All the precip is coming from dead ahead, fanning out, and whipping past on all sides as we drive into the funnel of this stuff coming at us.
I appreciate the responses, everyone. This probably should have gone in IMHO since there is no factual answer to my question(s).
LSLGuy, I was indeed ignoring relativity, the finite speed of light, etc. As I said in the OP, “Let’s assume faster-than-light travel is possible, since the video makes the trip in less than two minutes” and then in post #7 “…even if the Enterprise was traveling 6 times the speed of light it would take at least a year to go through the cluster.”
But your explanation about the stars being modeled as a very diffuse gas clears up one of my misconceptions. When I said the Enterprise (or the imaginary camera in the NASA animation) wouldn’t see the stars whizzing past that way, I didn’t consider that all of the stars wouldn’t necessarily be visible at the start of the trip. I was thinking about the stars on the view-screen at the beginning of our journey. But smaller, dimmer stars would constantly appear and they would seem to originate from the center of our field of vision. Your example of flying through snow helped me realize that.
It gets tricky when we try to add the real-world stuff, especially the part about traveling faster than light in a relativistic world. Well, maybe there’s a simple solution but it’s above my pay grade.
Next you guys are going to tell me that there’s no such thing as a Star Trek-style transporter and if I ignore the myriad reasons why in order to imagine one, there’s no telling how it might work because it’s imaginary!
Seriously though, I do appreciate the fact that some of you took the time to reply to a nonsensical question.
