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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.
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.
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.
It's the speed at which an object in a vacuum must travel to spontaneously get blisters to appear on its surface. What did you think it meant?
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.
"But officer, the light looked green!"
I tried that and got a citation for speeding instead. Do you have any idea what the fine is for going 201,184,560 mph in a 35-mph zone?
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
What really happens is that velocities don't add like that. They seem to for everyday objects, but relativistic effects become important at 0.7c. You should add them according to the Einstein formula: v = (B+v')/(1 + Bv') where B is the speed of one ship relative to an observer at rest (0.7c), and v' is the speed of the other ship in it's frame (0.7c). So the speed of one ship relative to the other is just v = 1.4/1.49 = 0.94c. You can see that, for small speeds, the product in the denominator is small, so we have the usual addition.