When we watch movies or play video games that feature space travel, someone inevitably ratchets up their ship’s speed to warp drive and begins traveling through hyperspace. In most forms of visual media, hyperspace travel is depicted pretty similarly — the stars begin as little pinpoints of stationary light peppered throughout the black backdrop of the universe, then quickly move to form long, straight lines of light, streaking by the ship’s windshield. Physics students at the University of Leicester have performed some research, and determined that if achieved in real life, hyperspace travel would look nothing like the movies.

In a paper published in the University of Leicester’s Journal of Physics Special Topics, a team of fourth-year Master of Physics students have determined that hyperspace travel would actually look a little dull if achieved in real life, and the iconic image of streaks of light stretching by a ship is (unfortunately) far off the mark. Rather, a crew of space travelers would see a central disc of light in front of them, with the light fading as it reaches the outer edges of the circle. Starlight wouldn’t even be visible. The students propose that this is because of a variant of the Doppler effect, which states the frequency of a wave changes based on the movement of the observer — the reason why an ambulance’s siren raises in pitch the closer it gets. The variant is called Doppler blueshift (Half-Life jokes aside), which is something of a visual version of the Doppler effect that states electromagnetic radiation will decrease in wavelength according to relative motion, which makes it shorten, and thus will become less visible.

Though visible light will become pretty much invisible in the scenario of hyperspace travel, the reason why travelers would see something of a disc of light is because of cosmic microwave background radiation, which is dispersed evenly across the universe, left behind by the Big Bang.

The students also calculated that X-rays from stars would actually push back on the ship, making space travel more difficult by slowing it down, and creating a pressure comparable with pressure felt at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

After making their findings, the students — Joshua Argyle, Riley Connors, Katie Dexter, and Cameron Scoular — offered up some advice to space travelers as well as Hollywood. Dexter felt that filmmakers should take the effect pressure would have on the ship and its crew into consideration, while Connors feels the crew should at least have some kind of sunglasses on hand.

The team based their research and the resulting effects of hyperspace travel on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. You can download and give the research a read over here (PDF).

Now read: How warp drives could annihilate entire star systems