[Physics] Limitations on how far one can travel in the universe

cosmologyspecial-relativity

Someone once incorrectly told me that, given the speed of light is the speed limit of the universe, aliens would have to live for hundreds of years if they are to travel distances of hundreds of light years to reach Earth.

In a "special relativistic" and non-expanding universe however, this is not the case. As velocity approaches the speed of light, say $v = 0.999c$, then we have

$$\gamma = \frac{1}{\sqrt{1-\frac{(0.999c)^2}{c^2}}} = \frac{1}{\sqrt{1-\frac{0.998001c^2}{c^2}}} = 22.37$$

Let us assume that an alien wishes to travel 100 light years from his planet to Earth. If the alien is travelling at $v = 0.999c$, he will observe the distance between his planet and the Earth to contract, and will measure the contracted distance to be:

$$\text{Distance} = \frac{100 \; \mathrm{ly}}{\gamma} = \frac{100 \; \mathrm{ly}}{22.37} = 4.47 \; \text{light years}$$

The Alien will be able to travel this distance in a time of :

$$\text{Time} = \text{distance}/\text{speed} = 4.47/0.999 = 4.47 \; \text{years}$$

It is easy to show that as the alien's speed increases, the time taken to travel the 100 light year distance approaches 0. It can thus be shown that thanks to length contraction and time dilation of special relativity, all parts of a special relativistic universe are accessible to an observer with a finite life time.

We however don't live in a purely special relativistic universe. We live in an expanding universe. Given the universe is expanding, are some parts of the universe no longer theoretically accessible to observers with finite life times?

Best Answer

Your question can be translated into "if right now we would send a powerful omnidirectional light pulse from earth into space, would there be galaxies that never see this light pulse?"

The answer is "yes". Due to the accelerated expansion of the universe, as described by the lambda-CDM model, only galaxies currently less than about 16 billion light years (the difference between the cosmological event horizon and the current distance to the particle horizon) away from us will at some time observe the light pulse.

A nice visual representation of this can be found in figure 1 of this publication.

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