FTL Currents May Power Pulsar Beams

thomst passes along news out of the recent AAAS meeting of a new explanation for pulsar beams that involves faster-than-light currents. Here are Los Alamos's press release and three related papers on the arXiv. "The new model explains the beam emissions from pulsars as products of superluminal currents within the spinning neutron stars' atmospheres. According to the authors' model, the current generated is, itself, faster than light, although the particles that compose it never individually exceed the universal speed limit, thereby preventing Einsteinian post-mortem rotation. The new model is a general explanation of the phenomenon of pulsar beam emissions that explains emissions at all observed frequencies (and different pulsars emit everything from radio waves to x-rays), which no previous model has done."

Comments

Re:Here we go again

[bcrowell]

Isn't the gravitational pull of one mass on another mass a form of information? Say you had some control over the momentum of the sun? The gravitational effect of the sun on the earth would change the instant the sun's momentum changed, not 8 minutes later.

Actually the prediction of general relativity is that the field experienced by the earth would not change until 8 minutes later. The effect propagates as a gravitational wave, and the wave travels at c. Although gravitational waves have not yet been detected directly, there is extremely persuasive evidence that they exist, based on the observed orbital decay of the Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar.