Page "Interstellar travel" Paragraph 7

A major issue with traveling at extremely high speeds is that interstellar dust and gas may cause considerable damage to the craft, due to the high relative speeds and large kinetic energies involved.

Various shielding methods to mitigate this problem have been proposed.

Larger objects ( such as macroscopic dust grains ) are far less common, but would be much more destructive.

The risks of impacting such objects, and methods of mitigating these risks, have not been adequately assessed.