Matter Discovered Traveling at Near Light Speed

mcgrew writes to mention New Scientist is reporting that scientists have clocked matter traveling at 99.999% the speed of light. "The fastest flows of matter in the universe shoot out of dying stars at more than 99.999% the speed of light, new observations reveal. When a massive star runs out of fuel, it collapses to form a black hole or a neutron star. In the process, some of the matter from the star also explodes outward at blistering speeds, producing an intense burst of gamma rays and other radiation."

Comments

Re:What's the speed of force?

[flyingfsck]

The force will propagate at the speed of sound in metal, which is about 200,000km/s or 2/3 the speed of light typically.

Re:Speed of Gravity

[Syberghost]

Are you sure about that?

http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/speed_of_gravity .asp

http://www.citebase.org/fulltext?format=applicatio n%2Fpdf&identifier=oai%3AarXiv.org%3Agr-qc%2F97060 82

Finally the solution

[Sierpinski]

Now all they need to do is figure out how to get the old people in Buicks to explode in the same manner, then maybe they'll stop driving 35 in a 65!

Seriously though, that's very interesting news. I'd like to know though, how do they know it was only 99.999% the speed of light? Could that be a measuring error, or some point-of-view discrepancy? With all of the constants in the Universe, it seems silly to me that something would be travelling at 99.9999% the speed of light (or however many 9s there were.)

Check my math

[cyberfunkr]

The fastest flows of matter in the universe shoot out of dying stars at more than 99.999% the speed of light, new observations reveal.

Soooo.... That would be 100%?