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Space Science

Blazing Speed: The Fastest Stuff In The Universe 572

Posted by timothy from the and-by-stuff-he-means-actual-stuff dept.
Unfallversicherung writes "'If you're light, it's fairly easy to travel at your own speed -- that is to say 186,282 miles per second or 299,800 kilometers per second. But if you are matter, then it's another matter altogether.' Astronomers are now measuring matter that moves at 99.9 percent of light-speed. Jupiter-sized blobs of hot gas embedded in streams of material ejected from hyperactive galaxies known as blazars."
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Blazing Speed: The Fastest Stuff In The Universe More

Blazing Speed: The Fastest Stuff In The Universe

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  • But is it fast enough... (Score:5, Funny)

    by ravind ( 701403 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @05:19PM (#11449849)
    To get first post? ...probably not :(

  • Not so fast (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Hatta ( 162192 )
    This stuff is at rest. It's we who are moving at 99.9% the speed of light.

  • Space.com article (Score:5, Informative)

    by metlin ( 258108 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @05:23PM (#11449881) Journal
    How about linking to the original Space.com article?

    Blazing Speed: The Fastest Stuff in the Universe [space.com].

  • Such precision? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PornMaster ( 749461 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @05:23PM (#11449883) Homepage
    I'm interested in how we can measure the speed of things that far away at that level of precision. Any measurement would rely on light from those gas balls reaching us at different times -- and as such, how can we tell that nothing is interfering with the light between there and here?

    • Re:Such precision? (Score:5, Informative)

      by lxs ( 131946 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @05:40PM (#11450028)
      Speed measurements in astronomy are usually made by measuring the doppler shift of of the light emitted. If you find the spectrum of for instance Hydrogen (a very common pattern) but the spectral lines are shifted compared to the spectrum of hydrogen on earth. From this you can measure the relative speed between us and the source. This is accurate , hard to distort and relies on only one measurement.

      • Re:Such precision? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Sebastopol ( 189276 )
        I reiterate the original posters interest.

        How do you know the spectral lines you're looking at are Hydrogen? Do the always appear in the same relative place compared to other elements, like helium? Or is it a matter that you expect to see a particular contour for *any* star, and the X-shift of that contour is the doppler shift?

        Thx,
        s
      • This is true only if you're only measuring radial velocity. That is, the target's velocity directly toward or away from us. You can also measure the target's proper motion, or motion at right angles to us. This is done by measuring its change in position over a known time. Once you have both, simple vector addition gets the total velocity.
    • I didn't have the patience to read the article (Slashdot effect), but I think they could measure the how the hydrogen (and other elements') emission lines are shifted because of Doppler effect. If those clouds are so fast, they emit a lot of light, and it should not be frustrated too much. The precision of measurements must surely be good, since the error bars must be lower than 0.1% of c.

  • Or Faster? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sandstorming ( 850026 ) <<moc.gnimrotsdnas> <ta> <eesnhoj>> on Sunday January 23, 2005 @05:24PM (#11449893)
    Maybe its possible [physlink.com] to travel faster then light then [blachford.info]
    • Oh yes.

      Talk about faster than light travel attached to some pop-sci articles. Atleast if you'd linked to a few respectable [wiley-vch.de] journals [aps.org] or archives [lanl.gov], it would make sense.

    • Hawking & Heisenberg v. Einstein (Score:5, Informative)

      by brian.glanz ( 849625 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @05:54PM (#11450132) Homepage Journal

      As I recall from a late 1990s lecture by Hawking [hawking.org.uk], some matter can exceed "the speed of light" and in doing so, escape a black hole. At an event horizon exactly, that border at which matter including light either escapes a black hole or not, the position of particles is known with complete precision. As such, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle [wikipedia.org] dictates that the speed of the particles cannot be known as precisely. Photons at the event horizon of a black hole are allowed, by a tiny quantity, some Scotty Factor in their speed because their position is certain. In plain words, these are the mathematics of the matter :) Some leptonic matter, in only such a particular position, can be slightly faster than "the speed of light."

      As theorized, Hawking's predictions that black holes might leak have, I understand, been observed as radiation from what are as-yet assumed to be black holes. Anyone knowing more than I do about this particular phenomenon is (un?)certainly welcome to add more. The explanation Hawking made was directed at interested and able nonprofessionals; he put forward some mathematics around but not specifically deriving the surprising conclusions. Made sense to me, anyhow. I believe the matter discussed here, blasers measured at .999999... of light's speed, is the fastest measured "directly." But I do not believe this is the fastest known matter, if you allow that "knowing" the speed of the matter Hawking discussed (observed as radiation) was theoretical and later indirectly measured.

      BG

      • Photons at the event horizon of a black hole are allowed, by a tiny quantity, some Scotty Factor in their speed because their position is certain.

        I actually did my dissertation in Hawking Radiation, but it's been ten years since I studied this, so I'm going to be a bit fuzzy...

        I don't recall anything about the position at the event horizon being certain. I remember it more in these terms:

        • Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle doesn't just apply to position and momentum. It also applies to the combinati
    • Gravity/antigravity can't cancel out mass. It can only cancel out weight. That second article was quite silly.

  • Futurama Quote (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 23, 2005 @05:25PM (#11449899)
    Thats impossible nothing can go faster than the speed of light.
    Of Course Not! Thats why scientists increased the speed of light in 2208.

  • Become your own grandpa (Score:5, Funny)

    by Josh Booth ( 588074 ) <joshbooth2000@nOSPAM.yahoo.com> on Sunday January 23, 2005 @05:25PM (#11449905)
    From TFA: "For us, the speed limit makes strange sense: Go faster than light, and you could return before you've left, become your own grandpa, or other perform other leaps of cosmic logic."

    Someone's been watching too much Futurama.
    • And therefore know that nothing can travel afaster then the speed of light.

      Of course, if you increase the speed of light there's no problem.
    • Someone's been watching too much Futurama.

      Too bad there werent' ENOUGH people watching too much Futurama.

      *sigh*

  • Gamma is not linear (Score:5, Insightful)

    by durandal61 ( 705295 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @05:28PM (#11449931) Homepage Journal
    Ah, how I love hillbilly journalists. Though the facts of the article itself are not incorrect, the way they are presented reeks of naiveté.

    Gamma, the factor that in general relates quantities (time, mass, energy, momentum) in two reference frames in Special Relativity, is non-linear. Being within 0.1% of the speed of light does not place you any 'closer' to breaking it than being within 50% of it.

    This is why instead of speaking of the speed of particles and objects travelling close to that of light, we refer to the kinetic energy they have, which gives a much more practical way of understanding these speeds.

    • Re:Gamma is not linear (Score:5, Informative)

      by helioquake ( 841463 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @05:53PM (#11450130) Journal
      A good post, though it's a little vague for the most of non-science geeks.

      Basically, in the relativistic frame, the Newtonian kinetic energy (0.5*mass*velocity^2) is no longer valid. To make "relativistic" correction, it needs to be scaled by the quantity called "gamma", which has the form:

      gamma = 1.0/sqrt(1.0-(v/c)^2)

      where c = speed of light and v is the motion of an object (here 0.999c). Now the relativistic kinetic energy is scaled by this gamma factor as:

      Kinetic Energy = mass * c^2 * (gamma - 1.0).

      In this case, v=0.999c, the gamma factor has the value of 22.4. Then for the mass of a Jupiter size planet, the relativistic kinetic energy is about 2e52 erg, which is about 10 supernovae explosion worth of the energy.

      Now if you imagine that v=0.9999 (another "9"), then the gamma factor jumps up to 70.7, instead of 22.4. That's what the parent poster meant to say by the "non-linear" term.

      The more you know, the better off you are.
    • maybe the whole universe is moving close to the speed of light, just not these blobs ... it's all relative after all. ...

      What's amazing about this is how fast they are moving away from their source ... not the absolute speed which as the parent sais doesn't mean a lot

  • hrrmmm (Score:5, Insightful)

    by odyrithm ( 461343 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @05:29PM (#11449939)
    "Nothing we know of zips along more quickly than light. Einstein, nearly 100 years ago, said it's not possible."

    Erm did'nt he say nothing(matter) can accelerate to the speed of light?
    • "Nothing we know of zips along more quickly than light. Einstein, nearly 100 years ago, said it's not possible."

      Erm did'nt he say nothing(matter) can accelerate to the speed of light?

      True, and also nothing that has mass can decelerate to the speed of light.

      You can have tachyons (faster) and 'tardyons' (slower).
    • exactly-- so why try to accelerate to the speed of light when you can simply start off by moving faster than it, thus avoiding the acceleration dilema. And then of course there's still Zeno to deal with.

  • Blazar detection (Score:4, Funny)

    by otter42 ( 190544 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @05:30PM (#11449948) Homepage Journal
    Dude, screw the asteroid detection. One of those things will only take out most of the world's costal area.

    Whereas one of those blazar things could take out the whole solar system. Imagine the fireworks there, as a mass the size of Jupiter smacks into the sun.

    Gentlemen... we cannot allow... a blazar detection gap!

  • MS worms (Score:2, Funny)

    by Skiron ( 735617 )
    Have they comparable data on how fast an Outlook user clicks on [OK] to launch an attachment? That must be as fast as the speed of light, at least!

  • Blazars are not the fastest thing in the universe (Score:5, Funny)

    by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @05:34PM (#11449977) Journal
    My buddy had a blazar and that piece of shit would be lucky to do 0 to 60 in 10 minutes.

    AH HA get it? chevye blazar kekekekekeke kthxbye

  • Stuff can go faster than light (Score:3, Insightful)

    by PsiPsiStar ( 95676 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @05:34PM (#11449983)
    Theoretically. It would just go backwards in time. Nothing with mass can travel AT the speed of light.

    I ain't a physics geek, but I did learn that much in college.
  • Why does light travel at that percise speed of 186,000 mph ? Why not 500,000 ?

    What is special about 186,000 mph ?

    Could it be that there is correlation between HiggBosons and lightwaves and fabric of space and strings ?
    • According to Google:
      the speed of light = 670 616 629 miles per hour
      the speed of light = 299 792 458 m / s
      the speed of light = 1.07925285 × 10^9 kilometers per hour

      So, someone lost some zeros... (we'd be pretty screwed if light was 1000 times slower. Imagine some 10MHZ CPU max...
    • The speed of light can be given in terms of other fundamental electromagnetic constants (1/sqrt(permeability of vacuum * permittivity of vacuum)), but I suspect that this doesn't really answer your question.

      Now, the question does have a less profound answer that is not what you have in mind. A meter is DEFINED as the amount of time that light moves in 1/299792458 seconds, so light moves exactly at 299792458 meters per second. The miles per hour speed is just a conversion factor away.
      • The speed of light can be given in terms of other fundamental electromagnetic constants (1/sqrt(permeability of vacuum * permittivity of vacuum)), but I suspect that this doesn't really answer your question.

        On the contrary, I think that answers the question perfectly. The speed of light is directly derivable from other fundamental constants which are inherent properties of our Universe.

        And, of course, the way to answer the question "Why are those constants inherent properties of our universe?" is to inv
    • God had to lower it to 186,000 miles per hour, or lose out on quadrillions of dollars worth of highway funds from congress. There are all sorts of studies proving that it conserves entropy or saves lives, but they're all bunk.

  • Accelerators (Score:3, Interesting)

    by doru ( 541245 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @05:36PM (#11450001) Homepage
    In modern accelerators electrons routinely have energies of a few GeV, meaning that their velocity differs from c by probably less than one part in a billion (I can't be bothered to do the calculation, but the rest mass of the electron is about 0.5 MeV).
  • They got players with names like, "laser", and "blazer", and all kindsa "-azers"!
  • Rimmer: "What the smeg is a blazar?"

  • Uhm.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nr ( 27070 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @05:46PM (#11450080) Homepage
    So what would it feel like to get hit by matter traveling at 99.9% of light speed? It would probably slice thru the body like a hot knife thru butter and you would not feel a thing, if it's not too big that is. :)

    • Re:Uhm.. (Score:3, Funny)

      by ikkonoishi ( 674762 )
      Have you ever been surfing along on the internet, minding your own business, and then suddenly *BAM* goatse.cx/hello.jpg.

      That would be about the same sensation.

  • "If you're light" (Score:5, Funny)

    by EEBaum ( 520514 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @05:52PM (#11450125) Homepage
    "If you're light, it's easy to travel..."

    Did anyone else read this and think, "Well, I'm not overweight... so I can go really fast?"

  • Significance of near light speeds (Score:5, Informative)

    by tkittel ( 619119 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @05:55PM (#11450141)
    Observing particles moving at 99.9% c is not so amazing as it sounds. First of all we routinely accelerate matter to great speeds for use in particle physics experiments (in places such as CERN, SLAC, FermiLab, Brookhaven, etc.).

    As an example, the LEP accelerator at CERN which was used in the period 1989-2000, acceleratod electrons to about 99.9999999977% c.

    But even outside the laboratories we have previously observed even larger speeds. The UHECR (ultra high energy cosmic rays) whose origin is still a mystery seems to consist of protons moving at speeds of 1-1^(-22) = 0.9999999999999999999999 c.

    Furthermore, it might seem like we need absurd accuracies in our measurements to discern the numbers from each other. But we don't really - the speed of the particle is practically the same when 0.99c and 0.99999c are compared, but things like the momentum of the particle will still differ wildly. For the curious, the formula is: momentum = m*v/sqrt(1-(v/c)^2).
    • As an example, the LEP accelerator at CERN which was used in the period 1989-2000, acceleratod electrons to about 99.9999999977% c.

      right, sure, but, an electron is one thing, a ball of gas the size of jupiter is another... on earth we accellerate tiny little masses to high speed... what they're measuring is something more massive than our own planet

  • Unilectron (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @05:55PM (#11450148) Homepage Journal
    I've always been intrigued by Feynmann's conjecture that there's only one electron, which moves so fast that it appears in all the times/places in the universe that appear to be individual electrons. That accounts for "every" electron having identical properties - it's the same electron. But I suppose that setting different quantum properties, like spin, to different states, without seeing that state "propagated" to "other" electrons, defies that model. Or does it? Maybe we just haven't tested enough electrons, or maybe our technique for setting state actually sets the state of the (moving) space in which we measure that persistent electron state. Or maybe Feynmann had even more clever subtleties in his model. Or maybe it was all just a bad idea.

    • Re:Unilectron (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 23, 2005 @08:08PM (#11451085)
      Actually, that was Wheeler's conjecture to Feynman, which Wheeler himself ruled out in a followup conversation.

  • heavy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @05:58PM (#11450176) Homepage Journal
    Wouldn't such large, fast masses thereby account for the majority of "stuff" (matter/energy) in the Universe? If they were previously unaccounted, wouldn't that reduce the amount of "dark matter/energy" postulated to be bending the observable universe, by showing another gravity sink instead?

    • Re:heavy (Score:4, Informative)

      by drudd ( 43032 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @08:23PM (#11451193)
      Well the rest mass of a single star (say the same mass as the sun) is 2x10^33 * (3x10^10)^2 ergs ~ 1.8x10^54 ergs. In this [slashdot.org] post the energy of these objects is estimated at 2x10^52 ergs, so the rest mass of a single star is 90 times one of these objects, and there are on the order of 10^10 stars per galaxy. So before we even discuss dark matter you'd need a hell of a lot of these objects to have greater energy than just the visible stars in our galaxy.

      Doug
  • "If you're light, it's fairly easy to travel at your own speed -- that is to say 186,282 miles per second or 299,800 kilometers per second."

    Light is faster with the metric system... :)

    Doh!

  • Read about the Oh My God proton (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mukund ( 163654 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @06:03PM (#11450205) Homepage
    You should also read about the Oh My God particle [fourmilab.ch] (it's real and not a joke). This proton particle travels almost as fast as light. After traveling one light year, the particle would be only 0.15 femtoseconds--46 nanometres--behind a photon that left at the same time.

  • In just what reference frame...? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by JonLatane ( 750195 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @06:06PM (#11450223)
    If I'm not mistaken, one of the basic principles of Special Relativity is that light travels at the same speed in all reference frames. In other words, if you're driving at 50mph and a beam of light passes you, it passes at the same speed (relative to you) as if you were standing still or traveling at 100mph, or even at 1,000,000mph.

    I suppose it must mean these gases travel at (nearly) the speed of light with reference to stationary objects. But of course, light itself still moves as fast compared to this stuff as it does compared to us.

  • Actually faster than light... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PSaltyDS ( 467134 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @06:27PM (#11450393) Journal
    I remember a SciAm article about cosmic matter (protons) actually going FASTER than light. The trick was that nothing goes faster than light in a vaccuum, but what about in air? When cosmic rays going .99c hit the interface of the upper atmosphere there are conditions where the refracted speed of light is less than the speed of those particles.
    • It's called Cerenkov radiation [mcmail.com] and was discovered in 1926.

      It's frequently observed as a ghostly blue light in the deep water holding tanks for freshly-spent fissile material from nuclear reactors. Some of the active particles travel faster than the speed of light in the water, leading to the Cerenkov effect.

  • ... sounds like someone I used to work for (Score:3, Funny)

    by JMZorko ( 150414 ) on Sunday January 23, 2005 @07:06PM (#11450644) Homepage

    "Jupiter-sized blobs of hot gas embedded in streams of material ejected ..."

    ... the resemblance is uncanny :-)

    Regards,

    John

  • Simple (Score:3, Insightful)

    by brsmith4 ( 567390 ) <brsmith4@gmail. c o m> on Sunday January 23, 2005 @08:47PM (#11451351)
    There is a lot of talk and a lot of debate going on here with regards to the effects of near-light speed travel. A theory that seems to fit General Relativity and recent expeditions to measure a phenomenon called "Frame Grabbing" should provide some insight:

    1- Any object that travels through space-time has an effect on space time. Think, for a second, of space-time as a gas. When you accelerate an object through this gas, much of the surrounding gas is pulled along with the craft due to drag. Any object/material traveling through space-time will pull along with it "Frames" of space-time. This, in theory, is the cause of Time Dilation, as predicted by General Relativity.

    2- As you approach c, you are dragging more "Frames" with you. Hence the reason Time Dilation is more evident and further exagerated the closer you get to c.

    3- To achieve speeds faster than that of c, the material must be "invisible" to space-time itself. Any drag on space-time, produced by a craft or any sort of matter will render any attempt to break the limit c impossible. Current linear motion produces an almost cavitational effect, where frames are, in essence, skipped while older frames are continually dragged by the mass causing clock skew and a need for even more energy to achieve acceleration. This is not dissimilar to the effect of breaking the sound barrier, only we are describing a completely different medium, space-time, not gas.

    4- By skipping over current frames and dragging older ones with you, the time lapse occuring on or within that particular body will appear slower to the observer than said observer's time lapse. It is because of this that it is theoretically impossible to travel backwards in time and only possible to travel forward at different rates.

    If anyone has any objections to this, let me know. IANAP (I am not a physicist) so I could be dead wrong. It is just that, this makes the most sense to me and seems to fit the facts best.

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