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Space Science

Fast-Moving Neutron Star From Hubble 86

Posted by michael from the tides dept.
CEHT writes: "Recently, the Hubble discovered a fast moving neutron star which is 10 trillion times denser than steel, 100 times faster than a supersonic jet. Here is the article from CNN.com." If we had a General Products hull, we could send a probe to investigate.
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Fast-moving Neutron Star from Hubble More

Fast-moving Neutron Star from Hubble

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  • whoops, not 200,000m/s.
    It is 200,000 km/h = 55556m/s.

    Which is even slower.
  • Looks like the signatures on this discussion will be worth more than the actual comments :)

    I dont' blame anyone, I also don't know what to say (exept that headaches definitely suck), and I even don't have a sig :)
  • the article states that a neutron star is one "...composed entirely of neutrons".....

    not completely true

    it should read that a neutron star is composed almost entirely of neutrons

    just thought I'd be anal!

  • Damn stupid moderators.

    Moderators: please mod down ALL Larry Niven / Ringworld references, and show everyone what humorless, discussion-stifling bastards you all are.

    P.S. Do not try to post useful discussion here, or start discussions. You will be ignored, moderated down, and eventually bitchslapped.

    Thank you.
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • last time i checked "m/s" was "microns per second"

    It flipping well is not and never has been. And apart from anything else its micrometer not micron. You can't make a plural out of an adjective.
  • m/s = meters per second.. it always has, it always will.. they're called s.i. units.. that "standard international" something that Americians no nothing about.. tune into the 20th century and then maybe you can join us all in the 21st.
  • It's really from Niven's short story 'Neutron Star'. Protagonist goes on an exploratory visit to a close orbit around a neutron star, safe inside his ship's indestructible hull made by "General Products". He still almost dies. Why? Tidal forces --- his head wants to go in a slightly different orbit than his feet do.

    -t

  • ...if it was, we could land a flag on it.
  • hey don't say americans don't know about metrics just cause a few idiots don't know, all you have to do is take a general physics (or math) course and you'd know thats m/s is meters per second. so yes he's an idiot for thinking that but; one you assume he's an american,(which he probably is, but not necessarily(sp)), and two you assume americans don't know the metric system, which many do know they just choose not to use, there's a distinct difference.

    but to reiterate again he's a damned idiot

    a bugg

  • 747 CAN fly around 1000 km/h.
    It is 277m/s. Ask anyone who fly often.

    Everytime I'm on a 747 I'm seeing speeds like 800 to 1000 km/h on the report screen. Go figure.
  • I liked the Ringworld Engineers, but the third one (Throne) could have been a short story and not lost anything .

    The last Fafhrd and Grey Mouser book was a waste of paper, on the other hand. Probably the most disappointing book I ever read.

    TWW (over here in Blighty)

  • Works out to .00014c (Score:3)

    by kevin805 ( 84623 ) on Saturday November 11, 2000 @12:54AM (#630836) Homepage
    Assuming "faster than a supersonic jet" is 1500 km/h, this works out to .00014c. I suppose this is pretty fast for natural phenomena, but I think we have already attained over a third of this ourselves.
  • Teaching your grandmother to suck eggs? That's a new one on me...

    I've read the Foundation Series, and the Le Guin books; I need to read the Robot books, and the other stuff still... :)

    Re:Leiber--I could never get into the "Swords" stuff; I read that a long time ago, in the big book club edition.

    And while we're Offtopic, have you read the Amber books? It's probably not Sci-Fi, but it could be; it's definitely pulp. I love those, and just about everything else I've read by Zelazny.

    Thanks for the other authors; I love the older stuff, but never know which ones are good. (Do you remember "The Stars, Like Dust"? That was fun...)
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • So which star moves faster?
  • pshaw; there's no sound in space, so how could it be faster than anything that measures it's distance with a quantum so close to zero that it makes no odds?
  • What are the chances that the star will have a gravitational effect on our solar system? I figure close to none considering the distance - 170ly. int 20h
  • How is this going to effect the CHILDERN? What about the childer????
  • ok but here's the thing.... they are saying its 100 times faster than a jet travelling at the speed of sound.... not 100 times the speed sound would travel in space ( which it doesn't because sound requires vibration of air particles or something similar.... doesnt work in a vaccuum, just think of all the sci-fi movies where they point out in space no one can hear you scream..... ) so anyway my numbers for relative speed are still relevant because they're comparing it to speeds achieved on earth
  • Hey! That's not offtopic at all. Maybe I should explain: Moliere (a famous French playwright BTW) wrote a play with a character Tartuffe (from which we derive the word Tartufferie). This character explained that opium worked because it has a 'soporific virtue'. Now any but the least bright person realises that 'has a soporific virtue' is nothing other than a restatement of 'opium makes you soporific' but somehow it sounds more scientific to the uneducated ear. Well explaining why neutron stars might fly out of a nova in terms of an 'asymmetric explosion' is much the same thing. It is quite clear to anyone who knows the meaning of the word 'asymmetric' that any explosion that flings out a neutron star is asymmetric. So this is a vacuous explanation is it not? But somehow 'asymmetric explosion' sounds scientific. The word 'asymmetric' probably sounds really technical to a science journalist who doesn't really understand what they are talking about and that's why it was probably used in the original article.
    --
  • Who cares about that? All I wanna know is if it can tell the difference between butter and "I can't believe it's not butter".

  • Re:You call this fast? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    200 times the speed of a 747 aircraft (about 200,000m/s)

    A 747 does not travel at 200,000 miles per second, dumbass. Neither does it travel at 1,000 miles per second, if that's what you were trying to say.
  • I still wouldn't want to run into something going that fast. :-P
    ---
    Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
  • I know jack shit about hard science myself, but Slashdot did recently run an article about space probes possibly travelling with magnetic solar "windsails".

    Same thing, but on a larger intergalatic scale? Oh come on--you have to wonder.

  • Re:General Products? (Score:3)

    by Fervent ( 178271 ) on Saturday November 11, 2000 @01:28AM (#630848)
    If I recall correctly, while all of their ships in the book had "General Products" hulls, only one, the Longshot, could actually be sturdy enough to be used in such a dangerous mission.

    Of course, I wouldn't use a General Products hull at all. I would use that radiation-shielded American-made craft from the future in Michael Chrichton's "Sphere".

    Hell, that thing survived a trip bouncing off a black hole, went through time, sat at the bottom of the ocean for three-hundred years AND managed to pick up a gold alien ball that got the better of Samuel Jackson.

  • All cosmic velocities are measured relative to the frame of the microwave background.

    The images of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) from the COBE satelite (amoung others) show that the CMB is doppler shifted in opposite directions (a dipole shift) on either side of the Earth. By defining a stationary observer as an observer for which there is no dipole shift, it is possibleto define a frame which all observers, at any point in spacetime, will define as stationary. Therefore all observers will measure the an object as having same speed relative to this frame.
  • All velocities in astronamy are measured relative to the cosmic microwave background, which defines an absolute stationary frame for all observers.

  • some info (Score:4)

    by Random Walk ( 252043 ) on Saturday November 11, 2000 @01:36AM (#630851)
    Neutron stars are the remnants of supernova explosions. It is well known by now that the neutron star often speeds away from the explosion with a "kick velocity" of several 100 km/s (as far as I know, the record is well above 1000 km/s). The reason is not yet clear, although there are some theories, one of them being asymmetric explosion. More theories can be found here [xs4all.nl].

    So the speed of RX J1856.5-3754 (about 85-100 km/s) is more in the lower range. What make this star interesting is not its velocity, but the fact that it is rather unique, because it does not show any activity (e.g. pulsations), unlike most other known neutron stars.

    Also, as there is no gaseous shell from the supernova left, thus it must be quite old (at least 100000 yrs), but nevertheless the neutron star is still rather hot (as evidenced by its X-ray emission). This is puzzling because neutron stars have no internal energy source (unlike "normal" stars that are powered by thermonuclear reactions), and therefore should cool down continuously from the moment of birth.

    There is an ESO Press Release [eso.org] about this object which offers much more info than the CNN article, yet is still written for non-scientists.

  • Another Larry Niven invention, scrith, would do you better. It was the hyper-tensile material that the Ringworld floor was made of.

    Now, if we could just get some Rishathra going! :)

  • So the neutron star emits X-rays...
    from what I remember from my stellar astrophysics class, doesn't that imply mass transfer?
    Is it possible that this NS has an unidentified partner?

    I also remember that there is a significant number of neutrons stars that aren't pulsars, most significantly those that are NOT in binaries, as RX J1856.5-3754 seems not to be in.
  • Just a minor nit - GP hulls were impervious to everything except light and...

    GRAVITY!

    In the story Neutron Star, this exact weakness in exposed in explicit detail. Why do I remember this one short story? Thank my physics teacher who had us calculate the difference in g between the protagonists' head and feet.

    Anyway, having a GP hull would do us no good for exploring a Neutron Star.
  • It doesn't necessarily imply mass transfer from a binary. Remember, this star has been flying through the galaxy for quite a while, and the galaxy is pretty far from empty. I imagine that it could stay hot just by accreting interstellar dust.

    It could still be hot from the last time it smashed into a pre-space flight civilization's planet =-]
  • v=s/t
    v*t=s

    277m/s * 10 s = 2770 m = 2,7 km
    I don't think Seattle is only 2,7 km away from New York ;).
  • You forgot antimatter, that one turned out to be a real pain in the ass.
  • a gross generalization on slashdot? Never. My mum knows what m/s means and she knows fuck all about physics, and that's the norm here (.au btw).
  • Neutron Star - the book that turned me on to Larry Niven. If someone does go don't send a moron who doesn't know about tidal forces.
  • one of them being asymmetric explosion
    And I guess opium makes people soporific because of its soporific virtue. It's amazing what you can get away with saying if it's meant to be 'scientific'.
    --
  • 10 trillion times denser than steel, 100 times faster than a supersonic jet.
    Scientist 1: "Look, its a bird"
    Scientist 2: "No, its a plane"
    Scientist 1: "No, its SUPERNOVA!"
    Scientist 2: "And they wonder why we haven't found the higg's boson yet..."

  • >Sound travels at slower than twice the speed of an ordinary 747 aircraft. 200 times the speed of a 747 aircraft (about 200,000m/s) is not a very big deal on the cosmic scale...

    Last I checked 200,000 m/s was faster than the speed of light

  • General Products? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    OK, I'll bite... what SF is this from?
  • >OK, I'll bite... what SF is this from? Ringworld by Larry Niven
  • OK, I'll bite... what SF is this from?

    Ringworld by Larry Niven

  • 0wnz j00!

    Sorry, I just had to do that. Larry is the coolest guy around... (Except CmrTaco, of course)
  • Is it faster than a speeding locomotive? Can it leep tall buildings in a single bound?
  • Now that's what I call satellite internet access!
  • When is THIS one scheduled to smash into the earth?
  • probally one of the better books out there :)

  • Re:Not *another* apocalypse! (Score:3)

    by ideut ( 240078 ) on Friday November 10, 2000 @10:43PM (#630871)
    When is THIS one scheduled to smash into the earth?

    It's currently 200 light years away. The closest this thing will get is 170 light years. And that's in 300,000 years. In summary, no.

  • Yes, but... (Score:3)

    by Pig Hogger ( 10379 ) <(moc.liamg) (ta) (reggoh.gip)> on Friday November 10, 2000 @11:32PM (#630872) Journal
    If we had a General Products hull, we could send a probe to investigate.
    ... it won't do you good if the star is made out of anti-neutronium...

    --
    Americans are bred for stupidity.

  • Well how fast is this supersonic aircraft moving? Mach 1? Mach 2? Lets assume Mach 1 and thats why it said supersonic jet, Mach 1 is 741.81729 miles/hour at sea level thus putting our friend at 74181.729 Mach, or 55029289.17429441 miles/hour.

    This message brought to you by the too much free time society.

    Adler

  • Now, if only I could get a sliver of that material, and install it in the right location, maybe I'd finally solve the hardware boot issue I've been fighting for two years:) That's assuming it conducts electricity at all... I'm wondering if material that dense wouldn't have pretty bound up electrons.
  • Not when you look at the angular velocity, which is what matters to astronomers, I suppose. It is, by my calculations, 1.8921x10^18 m away, and moves with a linear velocity of 10582 ms^-1. That would mean it has 5.7357x10^-15 rads^-1 angular velocity, which would not be visible as movement to the naked eye(especially since the earth rotates with an angular velocity of about 7.2722x10^-5 rads^-1.
  • No, it's not a space ship..... just a huge bullet type projectile aimed at some far off place that pissed off some one who had a bigger gun.
  • I assume that they use the sun as the frame of reference. Aside from a (relatively) slow expansion of the universe, most stars do not move fast relative to the sun, but this one does.

  • km = kilometer (1000)
    m = meter (1)
    mm = millimeter (1/1000)
    um = micrometer (1/1000000)

    so:

    m/s = meters/second
    um/s = micrometers/second

    I don't know why it's a u (usually written in script, more like u... too many other m's I guess.
  • The article itself reminded me of yet another SF book, Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward.

    From the publisher:

    In a moving story of sacrifice and triumph, human scientists establish a relationship with intelligent lifeforms--the cheela--living on Dragon's Egg, a neutron star where one Earth hour is equivalent to hundreds of their years. The cheela culturally evolve from savagery to the discovery of science, and for a brief time, men are their diligent teachers . . .

    The neutron star ventures close enough to Earth that we send a manned probe out to orbit it and study it. I know life on a neutron star sounds fantastic, but the author claims the science still holds up [space.com].

    Definitely gets a thumbs up from me...

  • Say that again moron.

  • You'll probably have read a lot of what I'm about to say: I do hope you don't think I'm teaching my grandmother to suck eggs...

    Niven's other "Known Space" stuff: World of Ptaavs, Neutron Star, Protector, Tales of Known Space, A Gift From Earth & The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton? (Personally, I don't like the newer stuff, Ringworld Engineers/Throne and all the Man-Kzin War rip^H^H^Hspin-offs)

    Gotta read some Asimov: Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation, The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, The Robots of Dawn.

    Philip K Dick: A Scanner Darkly, all his short stories, Ubik, Dr Bloodmoney, The Man In The High Castle [stops listing Phil Dick stuff by main force]

    Over here in Blighty, there's a series of books been published by Millennium called "SF Masterworks". They do exactly what it says on the tin: buy all of them.

    Ursula Le Guin: The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness

    E E 'Doc' Smith: start on Galactic Patrol (yes, I know it says it's number 3 in the series, but trust me), then do Grey [sic] Lensman, Second Stage Lensmen, Children of the Lens, then go back for Triplanetary and First Lensman, then if you can be arsed read Masters of The Vortex, but prepare to be disappointed

    Slightly offtopic, but Fritz Leiber: all the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stuff: Swords... and Deviltry, against Death, in the Mist, Against Wizardry, of Lankhmar, and Ice Magic, The Knight and Knave of.

    Is that enough to keep you going?

  • Geez you're still living in the world where nobody knows m/s = metre per second.

    It is a world of METRICS. Leave your own little world of 18th century and join us!

    Better yet, reply with your real handle so we can send it to the Smithsonians.
  • Thanks for that link. By coincidence I just finished re-reading Dragon's Egg last night -- kind of odd to see a /. story on it today.

    3prong
  • I don't know why it's a u (usually written in script, more like u... too many other m's I guess.

    It's a "u" because it's actually a lower-case "Mu" which happens to look like a "u" to most people. One can see the "M" in a properly written "Mu"

    ...|...|....
    ../|../|....
    ./..\/.|_...
    /...........

  • The General Products Corporation (and their mainstay product line of spaceship hulls) was the mouthpiece of the cowardly race called the "Puppeteers" in the book Ringworld

    Actually the Piersons Puppeteers, and with it GP, spans more than just the Ringworld series (or Neutron Star for those who mentioned it). The Puppeteers, along with the Kzin, and other elements of that universe belong to Larry Nivens "Known Universe" books - a set of books with completely different stories set within the same universe. These include a good number of Mr. Nivens work.

  • No, we could send a probe to investigate. And we'd be making tasty soup at the same time. Win-win, no?
  • That's what the ESO article says (about interstellar dust accretion). I tend not to agree with this simple explanation. Any neutron star can accrete interstellar dust - so why aren't they just as hot?
    There just isn't enough matter in interstellar space to "light-up" a neutron star that brightly.

    Remember good old Cygnus X-1? It's X-ray outpouring couldn't be explained until it was discovered that it was in binary.

    I think that in the coming months we will see that this NS has some sort of companion, or that the X-ray source does not actually belong to this particular NS.
  • "A stasis field isn't actually a part of a GP hull. I haven't kept up with the recent Niven books, so I might have missed some reference to it. But in the original stories introducing the GP hulls, there was no mention of it. "

    I beg to differ, as in the book 'Ringworld Engineers' there were thousands of ships and buildings, trapped in stasism and melted into the crustal walls of planet Canyon (where Loius Wu was living as a wirehead, 'member?). Besides, no puppeteer would be insane enough to travel without it!

    Also in the Ringworld books proper, they have some very strong gravity generators to buffer the tidal forces problem, and if it (or the heatsink) were about to fail, the stasis field would kick on again.

    Btw, for anyone living in the LA area, mr. Niven and mr. Pournelle regularly attend the LASFS on thursdays in Burbank. I can actually go ask him! but it seems clear that we have crossed the line into way too frickin geekey. like those fellahs from southpark last week, arguing over how many origianl trek episodes there were.

    :)Fudboy
  • wow! thanks for correcting my outrageous claims! i've checked out these "standard international" thingies you mentioned at www.bipm.fr/enus/ and they look pretty good. i think i've been converted! can i join you in the 21st century now? please? i promise i'll be good! please?
  • Actually it is pretty significant. If you consider that its travelling faster than roughly 330 m/s (a generally accepted value for the speed of sound in air without going into calculations), then it is travelling at 0.00011% the speed of light. At this rate it could travel from the nearest system to us in as little as 4.3 million years (given that the nearest system is about 4.7 light years away). It doesn't take a geologist or a cosmologist to understand that this is an incredibly small amount of time that an interstellar massive object could travel through space. While supernova fragments have been known to have many percentage point values of the speed of light, this *is* a neutron star.

    Yes, i believe you are correct that our system is moving through the orbit around the center of the Milky Way faster than that. We circle the milky way once in about 250 million years is what I've been told. But I don't think that there would be such a fuss unless it was disjointed.
  • Lets get Bruce Willis and the Armogeddon crew!
  • actually the neutron star is standing still, and we are moving really really fast.

  • ... (Score:1)

    by Tim12s ( 209786 )
    Is it a Bird? Is it a Plane? Oh shyte! It definatly aint Superman

  • Re:General Products? (Score:5)

    by fudboy ( 199618 ) on Friday November 10, 2000 @10:54PM (#630894) Homepage Journal
    The General Products Corporation (and their mainstay product line of spaceship hulls) was the mouthpiece of the cowardly race called the "Puppeteers" in the book Ringworld [amazon.com](so named because of their "heads", two mouth/eye stalks resembling human arm-puppets as well as their devious and manipulative ways. They are also tripedal which isn't nearly as silly as it sounds here).

    The GP Hulls are constructed of one solid piece of some fantastic transparent and indestructable material. The inside surface is coated with a 'stasis field' conducting film making the ship indestructable and extremely safe. If a threat were detected, such as immenent collision or attack, the satsis field would flip on and further interaction with the space-time continuum would be cut off for anything within the field. The computer would set to deactivate the field in random intervals and poll for conditions. if it was safe (say the sun you crashed into finally blew up and cast you free), then you were back in real time and could continue your voyage.

    As a side note, even with all these amazing strentghs, the puppeteers, as a race, were far to paranoid to actually use a spaceship. that would be madness!

    :)Fudboy
  • if only the residents of Florida could move that fast. Most of their walkers can't even reach warp 3 :/

  • Damned dense star (Score:3)

    by Gefiltefish ( 125066 ) on Friday November 10, 2000 @10:59PM (#630896)

    Stupid star...

    Too dense to take its time and look around a little.
  • Of couese, if I'd actually read the article, I would have discovered that a neutron is composed entirely of bureaucrats - I mean Neutrons... so maybe the chances of electrons zapping about in such matter are dim? 'scuse the ramblings
  • (CNN) -- What's as big as Manhattan Island, 10 trillion times denser than steel and 100 times faster than a supersonic jet? 100 times the speed of sound. using YOUR rates for the speed of sound, which sound reasonably accurate the speed is 74181.729miles/hour Where did you get your result from? my result: 741.81729 * 100 = 74181.729
  • If we were moving really fast, all the stars would look like lines, like in Star Wars.
  • Learn to speak Metric. 'm' means Meter. 'mi' means Mile. (* Or an imaginary meter, we're not too sure. *)

    Besides, he corrected himself. 200,000 km/h for the star's velocity. (Well, speed. For velocity, you'd have to mention that it is travelling at tangent to a circle around us with radius 170 LY.)

    200,000 km/h /3.6 = approx. 55555.6 m/s.
    1/200th of that is: 277m/s. 997km/h, or about Mach 0.6.

    Consider that I regularly drive my car at 140km/h (or for ye who cannot speak Metric, 90mph). That's about 39m/s. Let's make it 40, because I'm too lazy to reach for a calculator, and I've had the beast up to 160km/h. (Side note: not bad for a 1991 Subaru, no?) The Jet is going 277m/s. Let's give the jet the advantage of the Jetstream, and make it 280. That's 7x the speed. Now, if you don't believe the jet can go that speed, then you can go race the 747 from San Diego, CA to New York, NY, and tell me who wins.
  • last time i checked "m/s" was "microns per second", so 200,000m/s would be a little under half a mile per hour, which i think the average 747 can manage taxiing...


  • ...how many /. users do you think are named Elephant?

  • Since we haven't met the outsiders and bought the faster-than-light drive, we'd also need boosterspice, to live long enough to be around when the probe got there and sent back the data.

    For those who haven't read Niven's "Known Space" series:

    - The outsiders: wandering traders in information - a lifeform that lives at liquid helium temperatures. They don't use FTL drives themselves, but will sell you the plans. For a decade or so of your gross planetary product. They'll take installment payments. (As you can tell from their spacedrive they're no in any hurry.)

    - Boosterspice: A longevity drug by and for humans, made by a gene-engineered plant derived from ragweed. Good for several extra centuries of life.
  • Actually, SI is a French abbreviation for what translates as International System.

    And, for your information, the United States Constitution allows only one body to set weights and measures, the Congress. And the only system of weights and measures ever adopted by Congress was the metric system, back in the 1860's, later reinforced by the U.S. being an original signatory to the Treaty of the Meter in the 1880's. So, the rest of the world has finally caught up to where we were in the nineteenth century.
  • The GP Hulls are constructed of one solid piece of some fantastic transparent and indestructable material. The inside surface is coated with a 'stasis field' conducting film making the ship indestructable and extremely safe. If a threat were detected, such as immenent collision or attack, the satsis field would flip on and further interaction with the space-time continuum would be cut off for anything within the field. The computer would set to deactivate the field in random intervals and poll for conditions. if it was safe (say the sun you crashed into finally blew up and cast you free), then you were back in real time and could continue your voyage.

    Except that gravity gets through the hull. This is how it was discovered, in one Niven short story, that the Puppeteers' world had no moon (they didn't understand tides very well). Cost them a millions Stars' worth of bribery, could have been more.

    Resting comfortably on the surface of a neutron star might be fine with your stasis field on, but if the computer flipped it off for a nanosecond to check outside conditions, you'd be so much raspberry jam on the downhill walls in much less than an eyeblink, even presuming that the equipment survived long enough to re-enable the stasis.

    Figure it out: light goes at (more or less) 300,000km/s, and escape velocity for a neutron star must be pushing this, so if you were exposed to this kind of gravity field point-blank for a nanosecond you'd be doing many thousands of meters per second by the time the field was blocked again - so far past dead that only God could ``reassemble.''
  • After a few minutes with a calculator and a physics book, I find that the tide on the surface of your average neutron star is about 50g/m. If you don't insist on sending a manned probe, and you stay in orbit, you could compartmentalize the inside of the ship into 2cm cubes (using dividers made of the same material as the hull) and never face more than 1 g. I'm sure you could break up all your instruments into 2cm shunks, though i'm not so sure about the drives.
  • and yet 99% of your countrymen still think a meter is a messure of planetary mass.
  • I want my Euclidean geometry damn it. Every huckster's making the news lately.
  • light = 300,000 km/s.

  • You call this fast? (Score:3)

    by Wolfier ( 94144 ) on Friday November 10, 2000 @11:06PM (#630910)
    100 times faster than a supersonic jet is....

    C'mon. Nothing.

    Sound travels at slower than twice the speed of an ordinary 747 aircraft. 200 times the speed of a 747 aircraft (about 200,000m/s) is not a very big deal on the cosmic scale...

    I think even our solar system is moving along that speed circling the centre of the Milkyway. Just my guess tho.

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