Matter Discovered Traveling at Near Light Speed 403
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."
Consider the force involved (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What's the speed of force? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Speed of sound (Score:5, Insightful)
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:I am a genius (Score:2, Insightful)
If you can't tell dumb physics jokes on Slashdot, then I guess you really can't tell them anywhere.
If you don't want serious responses, you should try to make your dumb physics jokes actually funny. :)
Re:What's the speed of force? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Blistering speeds? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:So here's a question.... (Score:2, Insightful)
If the distribution is uneven ... then we'd be pretty unlucky to have our planet parked directly in the path of one of these jets.
How many likely-to-go-supernova-sometime-soon are there in our near (100LY) neighborhood?
Re:So what happens... (Score:3, Insightful)
So yes, the event happened 1 million years ago. The gamma rays took 1 million years to travel the distance, and arrived this year. The matter takes 1,000,003 years to make the same trip, and so it will arrive in 3 years.
Re:Time for a retarded question. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Kudos to the editor (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Information CAN travel faster then c... (Score:1, Insightful)