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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."
Much better subject line than what was found in The Firehose...
(The original subject line said "Matter found travelling at the speed of light", or something along those lines.
Close != At.
Given all the Complaints and BS the mods have to put up with sometimes, I think they should get complimented for a job well done as well.
We've known about gamma ray bursts for a long time. It's just that now we know how fast the matter is moving that causes these bursts.
Slackers.
It's the Planet Express ship!
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
will be snails pace when we get warp technology.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Hey guys, let's say you have a 500 foot pole out in space, far away from anything (no friction, nothing). you are on one end of the pole, and i on the other. Then i push the pole towards you. When does the other end of the pole move towards you, after MY END MOVES? is it instantaneous? or does it take .000000005 seconds of whatever. Like the atoms of the pole push each other on and on and so forth till it gets to the end.
if it does take time, is it faster than light, or slower? what if the pole was 300,000,000 meters long? does it take about 1 second for u to notice the other end moves?
It will be whatever the speed of sound is in the pole. Assuming a perfectly rigid material it would be instant, but there is no such thing and the actual speed will much less than c.
now all we need is to capture a sun in supernova mode to power out space ships, hope it has a good fuel tank...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
"Superluminal" expansion from Quasars have been known since the 1960's. (They appear to be superluminal, i.e., faster than light speed, as they are so close to the speed of light that time dilation becomes important.)
yes, light is particles, called photons. they are massless, which is what i believe allows them to move at the speed of light. and they always move at the speed of light too. i believe, in order to move at the speed of light, you must have always been, and always will, move at the speed of light. at light speed, time doesnt move, so you cant get out of light speed because that would require time to do so. i think it works the other way too.
What exactly does that scientifically mean?
THANKS SLASHD0T FOR YOUR PR0FESSIONALISM!!
"But officer, the light looked green!"
If I stood on some of this matter that was flying out of a sun, and shot a bullet in the direction I was going, that bullet would break the speed of light!
Yeah, Gravity moves at the speed of light. That's all part of general relativity.
If you were to push a 600,000 km pole 4 meters over a period of 1 second, then you've probably exerted a lot of force (pressure) in order to do so. Imagine that the pole weighs 100 grams per meter (i.e., it's fairly light). That pole has a total mass then of 60,000,000 kg. Assume that the force/acceleration is uniform, and you find that 4 meters over 1 second (starting from rest) requires an acceleration of 8 m/s^2. That implies a total force of 480,000,000 Newtons or about 108 million pounds of force. Not surprising that it would shrink a little under so much force...
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Actually, and believe you me I am no damn physicst (can't even spell it), a photon has no "resting mass", but does have momentum, which implies that there is an upper limit to is mass which cannot be zero.
WTF does that mean? Dunno. OK screw that. No more Wiki for me.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Not really. Take a brick of Jell-O. Push one end. You'll move it, but it will distort in shape, compress, wobble, send waves, etc.
The only difference between Jell-O and every other solid substance is that your eyes and brain just aren't precise enough to see at a small scale that they are all behaving the same way, just to different degrees.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
of chairs flying through meeting rooms in Redmond WA.
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That same question was what got Einstein started in the first place actually....
Why is this news? I read this article ten minutes from now.
Whats funny is if the sun imploded you would never know (except for the loss of light of course) because you would be the same distance from the center of mass with the same total mass.
But as other guy said, yea gravity propagates at the speed of light. We can test this (with precise instruments) because you can measure the pull of the moon easily. If gravity propagated instantly the moon would be pulling from an angle that would be 1.28 seconds ahead of where the moon appeared to be.
We think it's time goes slow, it thinks our time goes slow. It's one of the symmetries of a Lorentz transformation. What happens is that when one of the observers accelerates so that it can sit down and compare notes with the other observer the observer that did the accelerating will have seen less time go by. It's a peculiarity of the geometry of spacetime that an inertial observer takes the path of longest proper time, that is the time that the observer will see go by.
So what does that say about efficiency and/or the speed of the thing pushing the matter out at 99.999% of the speed of light? Either it's an extremely efficient transaction or whatever pushed on it was traveling faster.
Crookes radiometer (the aforementioned little thingy with the black and white paddles) does not rotate due to light imparted momentum (the force is too small). This theory of the rotation is disproved by the fact that after a certain point making the vacuum in the bulb stronger reduces the effect, which is the opposite of the expected result if the rotation was due to radiation force.
The actual forces responsible for rotation are a combination of forces due to molecule movement between the hot and cold sides of the vanes near the edges. Wikipedia has a good write up about it here.
There is an invariant mass for an object, i.e. a quantity that remains the same in all reference frames. This can be calculated based on energy and momentum. True of photons as well. Photons don't have a rest mass because rest mass is defined as the mass of an isolated and at rest relative to the observer object. Photons can't be at rest relative to an observer (and if they are isolated they are travelling at c).
If we had a device that could send a signal to earth from that star at the moment it expels this matter, we would have about 8 hours and 45 minutes. That's how much a radio signal traveling at the speed of light would beat the particle traveling at 99.999% at speed of light over 100 LY. If the signal isn't moving at exactly the speed of light, then we would have no warning at all.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If the distribution is uneven ... then we'd be pretty unlucky to have our planet parked directly in the path of one of these jets.
How many likely-to-go-supernova-sometime-soon are there in our near (100LY) neighborhood?
Well, yes, but the gamma ray burst is traveling at 100% of the speed of light, it being light and all. So the matter, travelling at 99.9997% of the speed of light, is trailing the gamma rays by an extra .000003 lightyears (94 light-seconds) every year.
So yes, the event happened 1 million years ago. The gamma rays took 1 million years to travel the distance, and arrived this year. The matter takes 1,000,003 years to make the same trip, and so it will arrive in 3 years.
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
Not really. Take a brick of Jell-O. Push one end. You'll move it, but it will distort in shape, compress, wobble, send waves, etc.
Boobs also act similarly. Or so I've heard.
Eureka, that's it! Boobie physics! What else could better attract young males to science and fluid dynamics?
I thought about this when I was younger. I came to the conclusion that it would probably react similarly to a water hose. Shoot it in one position, but move the trajectory, and quickly enough, the 'beam' of water bends. This time instead of water think: light shooting out. Sure it can 'bend,' but we are unable to see far enough to tell the difference.