Experiencing just one hour on the Falcon, Han returns to find everyone three years older.īecause the shortened Kessel Run spans 12 parsecs (39.6 light-years), a ship traveling nearly light-speed would take a little more than 39.6 years to get there.
Using the equation for time dilation, we can see how much slower Han’s clock ticks while on the Millennium Falcon traveling at 99.9999999 percent the speed of light. It marches on the same for everyone else. Unfortunately for Han Solo – and the larger hope of long-distance, high-speed travel – time only contracts for the person who's moving. After six months in the International Space Station, orbiting astronauts have aged 0.007 seconds less than the rest of us. For example, if we transport a super-accurate atomic clock across the globe by plane, we have to correct for the discrepancy between it and another clock on the ground. It’s an astonishing conclusion, but it’s how the world actually works. Anyone on a hypervelocity ship will age more slowly than those not on the ship. Not only do clocks obey this contraction, but biology does too. A clock running on a ship moving 99.9999999 percent the speed of light actually ticks more slowly for someone on that ship than a clock for an outside observer. The faster you go, the slower you wade through time’s river. c: This is the speed of light in a vacuum or around 186,000 miles per second.At these ludicrous speeds, time itself contracts. V: This is the velocity of the moving observer - Han Solo. This is what Han Solo experiences in the Millennuum Falcon. t: This is the amount of time passing for a moving observer.
The faster Han goes, the less time he experiences - even if we see him traveling over light years. Because of special relativity, time dilates or expands outward as the moving observer travels faster and faster. T': This is the amount of time passing for a stationary observer. What this awesome-to-say description really means is that if you were to draw a straight line between an object and the Earth, and a straight line between the object and the Sun, if the angle between the lines is one-arcsecond, then the object is one parsec away – or 3.26 light-years. A Parsec by Any Other Nameįirst coined in 1913 by British astronomer Herbert Hall Turner, the term "parsec" is a portmanteau of "parallax" and "second," and is defined as the distance from the Sun to an object that has a one-arcsecond (1⁄3,600 of a degree) parallax. The second – the one I choose believe – is far more interesting, because it means that when Obi-Wan sat down across from the wryly smiling Han Solo in that cramped cantina, he met a time-traveling smuggler born at least 40 years before the events of The Phantom Menace ever took place.
The first is that Solo's famous line of dialog was simply a mistake of terminology. A parsec is a unit of distance, not time, so why would Solo use it to explain how quickly his ship could travel? You’ll hear any reputable Star Wars fan point it out eventually: Han Solo's famous boast that the Millennium Falcon “made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs" may have sounded impressive, but from an astronomical perspective, it made no sense.
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