Question

ASTRONOMY (Theory of Relativity -Special)

Q: Suppose you had a spaceship so fast that you could make a roundtrip journey of 1 million light-years (in Earth's reference frame) in just 50 years of ship time. If you left in the year 2030, you would return to Earth

i) A million years from now

ii) The year 2130

iii) The year 2080

I think the answer is i) because there is no way in the question to translate how much earth time passes every year in our ship's frame of reference.

Answer 1

Yes, you are right.

By Earth time, you would return in a million years. However, you would only age 50 years. It means when you will come back, everything will be a million years older.

Therefore,

option (i) is correct.