YarpsDat wrote:rkolter wrote:YarpsDat wrote:
Actually, I think it will be quite close to infinity.
Given very little friction with interstellar matter, a bullet shot at the right angle would leave the local solar system (assuming if wasn't fired outside of one in the first place), possibly using gravity pull of different bodies to propell itself, and could pottentially travel through the whole galaxy...
The distance would be measured in parsecs...
Hm. I'd have to disagree.
The escape velocity of the solar system is 31.8 km/s. No bullet shot from any gun made today moves at anywhere near that speed. I suppose you could make a case for gravitational slingshotting the bullet outside the solar system, but that'd be one hell of a pool shot. Sattelites need corrections along the way to hit that shot; a bullet doesn't have any method of correcting it's flight path.
Well, I said "if it was shot at right angle"... but you're kinda right I guess.
It's like saying that if the bullet hit a dog, but the dog survived, and then the family took it to a different continent, then the bullet travelled thousands of kilometers.
On the other hand, should we even consider gravity wells in the calculation? It's like measuring range of bullets in a forest or a city- bullets get stopped by trees or walls, but that's their effective range, not the farthest distance they can travel.
So we should calculate the distance a bullet would travel in a space without stars, only with interstellar dust and gas...
I think it would be measured in lightyears. yes.
Yarpsdat, I think you're misjudging the amount of time we're talking about this bullet sitting in interstellar space, bathed by radiation and bombarded by fast moving particles.
Presume a gun has a muzzle velocity of 1000m/s. That's about midrange from what I've found online.
That's .1 km/s
Light travels 300,000km/s, or about 9,460,800,000,000 (9 trillion, 460 billion, 800 million) kilometers a year.
It would take a bullet moving .1 km/sec aproximately 95 trillion years to move one light year. That's 6,300 times the current age of the universe (give or take).
The bullet will be bombardedby interstellar radiation until it's very atoms are broken into simpler and simpler units. This is a measurable effect inside the solar system from the small percentage of fast-moving particles that make it through the heliosphere. If here on earth it's a trickle, in interstellar space it's a firehose.
Not to mention any stray dust particles that could literally rip it apart.
And if you removed all radiation and all dust particles, it still wouldn't make it. The universe is expanding, and unless something else stops it's acceleration, its acceleration will continue until in far less than one trillion years, atoms themselves are unable to sustain their form.
Or, if not that, remember that electrons can tunnel; while protons have a half life of 10^33 years, by 95 trillion years all your neutrons will have decayed into protons and electrons, and enough electrons will have tunneled away to leave your bullet literally falling apart.