A Direct Flight Across the Pond
I was watching the 2018 adaptation of Aniara the other day, and it got me thinking about how close we are to space travel between other exoplanets. In the movie a ship accidentally gets blown off course on the way to Mars, and plunges into deep space. Spoiler alert, the ship doesn’t encounter another solar system for 6 million years. We don’t know exactly where the Aniara ended up, since the movie only reveals that it’s in the constellation Lyra, which contains stars of varying distances from earth. This stack overflow post explains the math to find Aniara’s speed and distance given the time it took to get there (at least, it seems correct from my minimal astronomy knowledge…). Apparently, the ship would have been going between 1 and 31 km/s (traveling between 25 and 620 light years away). ...