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."

Kudos to the editor

[by Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Kudos to the editor

[It doesn't come easy (695416)]

Actually, the speed was calculated to be 99.9997% but there was a rounding problem when the report was generated via their new-fangled AI system and the system kept crashing from the unexpected logical impossibility...

Re:Blistering speeds?

[forrestt (267374)]

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?

Re:Blistering speeds?

[FrameRotBlues (1082971)]

You mean between ridiculous speed and ludicrous speed, right? Wasn't that the order on Spaceballs? Light Speed, Ridiculous Speed, Ludicrous Speed?

Re:Blistering speeds?

[drkich (305460)]

Please, for the sake of Scientific completeness, do not forget PLAID!

Re:Kudos to the editor

[Ed Avis (5917)]

Infinite nines (99.999.... per cent) would be the same as the speed of light. I say this only to have an excuse to link to a list of proofs that 0.9 recurring equals 1 [qntm.org].

To be clear...

[brian0918 (638904)]

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.

Re:

[ajs (35943)]

Didn't we already know about superluminal motion [wikipedia.org] (which turns out to be near-speed-of-light motion, viewed oddly), active galactic nuclei [wikipedia.org], etc.? What's the new info, here or is it just confirmation of what we'd known before?

99.999%

[Trigun (685027)]

Slackers.

Re:99.999%

[hkgroove (791170)]

Well, report back to us when your contrails are plaid.

Re:99.999%

[the dark hero (971268)]

That's Ludicrous!

Re:99.999%

[snowgirl (978879)]

I had a friend playing Silent Hunter, it was a German one, and when he put the boat into full speed ahead, they were saying "Wahnsinnige fortfahr aus!" I really had to listen to it a few times just to be sure. Then I confidently told him that one of the possible translations of that was "ludicrous speed".

He also got a kick out of "periscope" being literally "see-pipe" in German.

I know what it is, I know what it is!

[AltGrendel (175092)]

It's the Planet Express ship [wikipedia.org]!

99.999% Of the speed of light

[Timesprout (579035)]

will be snails pace when we get warp technology.

What's the speed of force?

[TheBearBear (1103771)]

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?

Re:What's the speed of force?

[The_REAL_DZA (731082)]

The only way you'd get a superluminal effect is if you had a perfectly rigid pole (and, seeing as how this is Slashdot, I'm going to discount that possibility.)

Re:What's the speed of force?

[by Anonymous Coward]

I know you're joking, but even a perfectly rigid pole would be subject to the propagation of forces. Think about what forces have to propagate in order to tell the other end of the pole to move. One atom has to repel the next atom using electromagnetic force, weak and strong nuclear forces, which has to in turn repel the next atom, etc, etc. There is an elastic repulsive process which goes all the way down the pole until it reaches the other end. And we know the fastest that this can happen is the speed of light. So the pole will be momentarily compressed as the force propagates.

No information can travel faster than the speed of light, as a general rule.

Re:What's the speed of force?

[Hatta (162192)]

What you're saying essentially is that there's no such thing as a perfectly rigid pole.

Re:

[ArsonSmith (13997)]

I'm sure there are plenty of ridged poles around. Just very few of them are used.

Re:What's the speed of force?

[totallygeek (263191)]

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?

Do not try to push the pole. That's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth: there is no pole. Then you'll see, it is not the pole that is pushed, it is only yourself.

Re:What's the speed of force?

[whimmel (189969)]

Woah!

I can see why this hasn't been modded up yet. Too much emotion in your impression. Whoa.

Re:Speed of sound

[by Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Speed of Gravity

[EMeta (860558)]

Yeah, Gravity moves at the speed of light. That's all part of general relativity.

Re:

[WaZiX (766733)]

That same question was what got Einstein started in the first place actually....

Re:Speed of Gravity

[MindStalker (22827)]

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.

Consider the force involved

[benhocking (724439)]

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

Re:Speed of sound

[NMerriam (15122)]

That is to say, it shrunk? isn'tthat weird???

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.

Re:What's the speed of force?

[Barterer (878209)]

The "speed of force" as you put it, is not really a speed inherent to force. You would be measuring how fast a tensile or compressive wave passes through the pole, same as the speed of sound through it. It would be much slower than the speed of light.

Re:What's the speed of force?

[Russ Steffen (263)]

I asked this question in a physics class and the answer I got, which makes quite a bit of sense, is that force travels through a material at the speed of sound. So if in your example your 500 foot pole was made of steel, the opposite end starts moving roughly 30 milliseconds after you push the near end. (The speed of sound in steel is very roughly 5000 meters/sec.)

Re:What's the speed of force?

[Cadallin (863437)]

Wow, I was hoping that there would already be an explanation answering this, but here you go: The speed of "force" as you put it, is actually quite slow. It's a actually the speed of sound through the object. Why? Because when you push the rod, you're bumping the molecules, they have to push the molecules in front of them, and on until you reach the end. This is actually a sound wave propagating the medium, you just usually can't hear it. Now, if you had a perfectly rigid pole (cue penis jokes here) it would seeming move instantly. However, no known substance is anywhere close to perfectly rigid. Even atomic nuclei, which are, far, far more rigid than bulk matter, behave like drops of fluid and can have waves propagate through them. So no, you can't forge a pole to another planet and communicate instantly, it would be hugely slower than normal radio.

Re:

[lelitsch (31136)]

Way before you run into any relativistic effects--or even the speed of sound inside the pole--basic 17 century Newtonian physics [wikipedia.org] will make the process less than instantaneous.

Also, thanks to Newton's Third Law, space is like Soviet Russia: In space, the pole pushes you [utk.edu].

Re:What's the speed of force?

[gatkinso (15975)]

>> is it instantaneous

No. Imagine a train at rest. The engineer decided to back up. Boom boom boom go all the cars in sequence as the slack between them is eliminated by the cars compressing together. Finally, the caboose moves. Same deal with matter, but on a much smaller and faster scale, involving molecules and atoms.

Re:What's the speed of force?

[veganboyjosh (896761)]

I think he's just yankin' your chain.

cool

[FudRucker (866063)]

now all we need is to capture a sun in supernova mode to power out space ships, hope it has a good fuel tank...

This is not new...

[mbone (558574)]

"Superluminal [wikipedia.org]" 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.)

Red-shift?

[bugnuts (94678)]

"But officer, the light looked green!"

Re:Red-shift?

[PhxBlue (562201)]

"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?

Re:

[(arg!)Styopa (232550)]

You should fight that. If you were traveling what, about 16% of the speed of light toward the stoplight, that "red" light (650nm) would have appeared "green" (550 nm) to you.

Not to mention that there would probably have been relativistic effects making your speed (from your viewpoint) and your speed (from the cop's viewpoint) significantly different!

I am a genius

[nomadic (141991)]

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!

Re:I am a genius

[wanerious (712877)]

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.

Re:

[xPsi (851544)]

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.

Your post is right on. I might add that when relativistic effects become important for everyday objects might be a matter of application. For example, some GPS systems need to account for relativistic effects for the relativive motion of objects in orbit with respect to the surface of the earth (moving much smaller than 0.7c). It depends on the accuracy requ

Re:

[FedeLebron (977157)]

Nope. Time dilation and space contraction take place here. Relativity states that if, say, you were going at 75% of the speed of light, and shot a missile at 50% the speed of light, neither you, nor the torpedo, nor a 3rd observer would see the torpedo go faster than light. They'd see it go juuust under c, about 95% of c. In relativity, adding of velocities isn't as simple as absolute v + relative v, it's an asymptotic function that means you never actually reach the speed of light.

Beating the previous record...

[jpellino (202698)]

of chairs flying through meeting rooms in Redmond WA.

Huh?

[DoofusOfDeath (636671)]

Why is this news? I read this article ten minutes from now.

Re:

[brunascle (994197)]

TFA answers just that:

but when it starts colliding with surrounding gas, it creates afterglows in visible and infrared light... [they measured] peaks of 153 and 180 seconds

turns out, the times it takes to produce the afterglow is actually what they use to measure how fast it was moving.

Re:Light is particles...

[brunascle (994197)]

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.

Re:Light is particles...

[gatkinso (15975)]

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.

Re:Light is particles...

[klaun (236494)]

For example, those little thingies with the black and white paddles in them that look like light bulbs from middle school science class work on the idea that photons transfer and take momentum from stuff they interact with. Momentum is a quality very closely tied with mass.

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 [wikipedia.org].

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).

Incorrect

[BlackGriffen (521856)]

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.

Re:

[geekoid (135745)]

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.