Acceleration in Space

In free space, far away from any influential gravity, if I were to shoot a
gun (bullet starts at 1000 ft/sec., or hit a golf ball with my driver, or
even throw a baseball (you can plug in the arbitrary numbers for the initial
acceleration), how far will these aforementioned objects travel? Will their
speed EVER change? I know that this is probably a sophomoric question for
most of you, but please indulge me. Thank you.

Cordially,
west

On 2007-01-02 00:05:46 +0000, "west" said:

In free space, far away from any influential gravity, if I were to shoot a
gun (bullet starts at 1000 ft/sec., or hit a golf ball with my driver, or
even throw a baseball (you can plug in the arbitrary numbers for the initial
acceleration), how far will these aforementioned objects travel? Will their
speed EVER change? I know that this is probably a sophomoric question for
most of you, but please indulge me. Thank you.

Cordially,
west

With no retarding forces, it will travel forever...

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This space reserved for Jeff Relf's 5-dimensional metric.


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west wrote:
In free space, far away from any influential gravity, if I were to shoot a
gun (bullet starts at 1000 ft/sec., or hit a golf ball with my driver, or
even throw a baseball (you can plug in the arbitrary numbers for the initial
acceleration), how far will these aforementioned objects travel? Will their
speed EVER change? I know that this is probably a sophomoric question for
most of you, but please indulge me. Thank you.

Cordially,
west


Over billions of years, reverse compton effect (collisions with
photons), and friction from collisions with atoms in space (there is
thought to be no perfect vacuum) may slow those objects somewhat.

Double-A

In article ulhmh.8442$tc5.6642@trnddc01,
"west" wrote:

In free space, far away from any influential gravity, if I were to shoot a
gun (bullet starts at 1000 ft/sec., or hit a golf ball with my driver, or
even throw a baseball (you can plug in the arbitrary numbers for the initial
acceleration), how far will these aforementioned objects travel? Will their
speed EVER change? I know that this is probably a sophomoric question for
most of you, but please indulge me. Thank you.

For any practical purpose they will travel as far as you like, and their
speed will remain virtually constant. Even between galaxies there will
be tiny amounts of material that create drag, but the timescales over
which deceleration could be detected will be on the order of those over
which you'd notice the objects losing mass due to evaporation, or having
their trajectories bent by the nearest galaxy cluster.

--
Odysseus

west wrote:
In free space, far away from any influential gravity, if I were to shoot a
gun (bullet starts at 1000 ft/sec., or hit a golf ball with my driver, or
even throw a baseball (you can plug in the arbitrary numbers for the initial
acceleration), how far will these aforementioned objects travel? Will their
speed EVER change? I know that this is probably a sophomoric question for
most of you, but please indulge me. Thank you.

Cordially,
west



The acceleration occurs while you are in contact with the bullet, golf
ball, or baseball (or any other object). Once whatever force is
imparted on the object ceases, the body will have reached a final
velocity. Likely it will encounter something in its travels from that
point on, but in principle, once that velocity is acheived, it will
remain the same.

West You got good answers here so far Let me get more technical. The
object for part of its spacetime is accelerating. How long before it
reaches its top speed and coasts is tricky. Once in a spacetime of
coasting it has lost its effect of acceleration which increases its
inertia. Best to keep in mind inertia,,acceleration and gravity are
indistinguishable. Note I added in inertia. Einstien only had
acceleration and gravity. Now I could bring in Mach. but I'll stay with
my thinking. Gravity will have the biggest effect on this free coasting
along object. It will slow it down coming out of a gravity field,it
will get it accelerating again going into a gravity field. If it comes
to close and sling shoots the gravity body West you can view that like
a comet,and how man uses Jupiter to have a probe gain speed. Gravity
curving your object concave,and then convex,and convex back to concave
etc. might be its biggest "rub" This is true of photons over long space
journeys. The amazing thing about photons is they never change speed but
the force of gravity can't alter their motion through space,but
transfers its energy into the speed of their frequency(vibration).
Gravity does this by changing the length of the photons wave. It all
fits Bert