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Jet from neutron stars seems to travel seven times the speed of light

An optical illusion created by the relative positions of Earth and a pair of colliding neutron stars makes it seem like a jet of radiation is travelling at seven times the speed of light - but thankfully no laws of physics have been broken

By Alex Wilkins

12 October 2022

An artist’s impression of two neutron stars colliding

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

A jet of radiation from two colliding neutron stars appears to be travelling at seven times the speed of light, according to measurements from the Hubble Space Telescope. Although this is merely an optical illusion, as nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, it provides key insights into mysterious gamma ray bursts , which aren’t fully understood.

In 2017, astronomers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory detected a wave, GW170817, produced from the collision of two neutron stars . This was followed up by dozens of…

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Do Gamma-Ray Jets Really Achieve Superluminal Speeds?

High-speed particle jets from gamma-ray bursts may exceed the speed of light in surrounding gas clouds, but do so without violating Einstein’s theory of relativity, says a team of astrophysicists from the Michigan Technological University and the College of Charleston.

An artist’s impression of a particle jet emanating from a black hole at the center of a blazar. Image credit: DESY / Science Communication Lab.

Gamma-ray bursts are the most luminous explosions in the Universe.

Most occur when some types of massive stars run out of fuel and collapse to create new black holes. Others happen when two neutron stars, superdense remnants of stellar explosions, merge.

Both kinds of cataclysmic events create jets of particles that move near the speed of light.

Michigan Technological University’s Professor Robert Nemiroff and Professor Jon Hakkila from the College of Charleston propose that these jets could reach superluminal speeds and create the time-reversibility seen in light curves of the gamma-ray bursts.

These proposed jets, however, do not violate the Einstein’s relativity because they only move faster than light does through the jet medium, not faster than light through vacuum.

“A good way to visualize this superluminal motion is to imagine someone on one side of a pond skipping a stone across the water in your direction,” Professor Hakkila said.

“The frequently-hopping stone moves through the air between hops faster than the waves it generates move through water.”

“You would see waves created by each skip of the approaching stone in reverse order, with waves from the most recent skip arriving first and those from the initial skip arriving last.”

“This superluminal blast explanation retains many characteristics of accepted gamma-ray burst jet models.”

“However, our scenario involves Cherenkov radiation , a type of light created by superluminal motion that was not previously thought to be important in generating the light curves of gamma-ray bursts,” Professor Nemiroff added.

“Standard gamma-ray burst models have neglected time-reversible light curve properties,” Professor Hakkila said.

“Superluminal jet motion accounts for these properties while retaining a great many standard model features.”

The team’s paper was published in the Astrophysical Journal .

Jon Hakkila & Robert Nemiroff. 2019. Time-reversed Gamma-Ray Burst Light-curve Characteristics as Transitions between Subluminal and Superluminal Motion. ApJ 883, 70; doi: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab3bdf

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The official news site of the College of Charleston.

Faster than the speed of light: new research looks at gamma-ray bursts.

Astrophysicists Jon Hakkila of the College of Charleston and Robert Nemiroff of the Michigan Technological University have published research indicating that blasts that create gamma-ray bursts may actually exceed the speed of light in surrounding gas clouds, but do so without violating Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Jon Hakkila

Hakkila and Nemiroff propose that such superluminal jets could create the time-reversibility seen in gamma-ray burst light curves. These proposed jets, however, do not violate Einstein’s theory of relativity because they only move faster than light does through the jet medium, not faster than light through a vacuum.

Hakkila says that a good way to visualize this superluminal motion is to imagine someone on one side of a pond skipping a stone across the water in your direction. The frequently-hopping stone moves through the air between hops faster than the waves it generates move through water. Hakkila says you would see waves created by each skip of the approaching stone in reverse order, with waves from the most recent skip arriving first and those from the initial skip arriving last.

This superluminal blast explanation retains many characteristics of accepted gamma-ray burst jet models, Hakkila says. Nemiroff adds, however, that their proposed scenario involves Cherenkov radiation, a type of light created by superluminal motion that was not previously thought to be important in generating the light curves of gamma-ray bursts.

“Standard gamma-ray burst models have neglected time-reversible light curve properties,” Hakkila says. “Superluminal jet motion accounts for these properties while retaining a great many standard model features.”

This work appears in a recent issue of The Astrophysical Journa l .

Featured image: A drawing of a superluminal jet. (Illustration by DESY, Science Communication Lab)

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Beyond Visible Light: Unraveling the Secrets of Gamma-Ray Bursts

By National Research University Higher School of Economics August 1, 2023

Stars exceeding ten times the mass of the Sun undergo cataclysmic explosions, transforming into black holes, accompanied by brief and unpredictable gamma-ray bursts detectable via space telescopes. Detailed study of these bursts and their associated optical radiation, as seen in 2021’s GRB 210619B, has provided invaluable data about the workings of these star explosions and the conditions they create.

They also discovered a bright optical emission.

Joseph Shklovsky, one of the pioneers of modern astrophysics, posited that a star’s existence is an eternal struggle between two conflicting forces: gravity, which endeavors to shrink the star, and the opposing gas pressure that seeks to disperse it. When the thermonuclear reactions that fuel the star’s core cease, the star loses its capacity to maintain balance and begins to collapse into a singular point.

This scenario, when it occurs to a star whose mass surpasses ten times the mass of our Sun, results in the core’s contraction and the explosive disruption of the outer shell. This leads to an extraordinarily powerful explosion on a galactic scale. This is how the most massive stars transform into black holes.

These explosions are accompanied by an intense burst of gamma radiation — a stream of photons carrying energy millions of times greater than the quanta of visible light we are familiar with.

A gamma-ray burst is an extremely brief — with a duration ranging from a fraction of a second to several hundred seconds — and unpredictable event. There is no way to anticipate the precise location within the skies and the exact timing of a gamma-ray burst. Furthermore, since the Earth’s atmosphere blocks gamma radiation, gamma-ray bursts can only be detected by using space telescopes.

Gamma-ray bursts have been recorded since the late 1960s. For many years, scientists only recorded gamma radiation invisible to the human eye. However, there were suggestions that these bursts might be accompanied by optical radiation that is observable from Earth. Indeed, it was observed for the first time on January 23rd, 1999.

To enable the rapid detection of optical radiation, scientists have developed robotic telescopes which have the capability to gather real-time data directly from the location of the burst. On June 20th, 2021, GRB 210619B, one of the most powerful gamma-ray bursts documented to date was observed using telescopes located in the Czech Republic and Spain, as well as the Russian Mini-MegaTORTORA system owned by Kazan Federal University and located in the North Caucasus. The telescopes began recording the luminous afterglow 28 seconds after the gamma-ray flash. The data acquired simultaneously from three telescopes made it possible to reconstruct the overall shape of the light curve, the slope of the optical spectrum at different times, and the early multiband evolution of the optical radiation.

“We were lucky. First, we observed a fairly bright afterglow. Second, we observed it with a high temporal resolution by capturing frames at a frequent rate. Third, we obtained information about the spectrum of optical radiation. In the Mini-MegaTORTORA system, we were able to conduct observations using a set of optical filters, including blue and visible (yellow-green), simultaneously. In other words, we measured not only the overall brightness but also the brightness displayed in specific individual colors. This is a rare, virtually unique case,” says Anton Biryukov, co-author of the study, Associate Professor of the HSE Faculty of Physics.

The availability of detailed data on radiation across various wavebands, including the optical range, made it possible to determine the physical parameters of the medium associated with the gamma-ray burst in the region where the optical radiation originated. “The extensive dataset obtained by the group enabled us to investigate the inner workings of the gamma-ray burst phenomenon. It was akin to surgically dissecting a gamma-ray burst and peering into its inner mechanism: examining the particles in motion, their energy levels, the density of the surrounding medium, and the characteristics of the magnetic fields involved,” the scientist explained.

The study authors concluded that the luminous phenomenon observed during a gamma-ray burst arises from the motion of high-energy charged particles, which exhibit velocities almost indistinguishable from the speed of light, within a rarefied medium characterized by a powerful magnetic field.

“Gamma-ray bursts are like beacons from the early universe. We record these phenomena at distances spanning several billion light-years. These rare sources provide us with an opportunity to learn about the workings of stars billions of years ago and how their existence ended, to explore the interstellar environment that enveloped them, such as the composition and quantity of interstellar gas, and how it interacted with the stellar ejecta,” explains Biryukov.

But studying gamma-ray bursts does more than expand our knowledge about the most massive distant stars. From a fundamental physics perspective, gamma-ray bursts serve as natural physics laboratories that manifest the most extreme conditions imaginable, encompassing ultra-high energies, velocities, densities, and gravitational forces. It is within these states that scientists can test the physical theories available to humankind.

“Physicists are well aware that the existing fundamental theories describing the world, such as the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, have their inherent limits of applicability. These limits can only be experimentally determined, and a gamma-ray burst serves as a natural experiment. However, detecting these limits is not an easy task. Continuing observations and striving to comprehensively describe as many similar events as possible is crucial for accumulating an adequate amount of information. But this pursuit aligns well with the natural progression of scientific knowledge,” claims Andrey Biryukov.

Reference: “Exceptionally bright optical emission from a rare and distant gamma-ray burst” by Gor Oganesyan, Sergey Karpov, Om Sharan Salafia, Martin Jelínek, Gregory Beskin, Samuele Ronchini, Biswajit Banerjee, Marica Branchesi, Jan Štrobl, Cyril Polášek, René Hudec, Eugeny Ivanov, Elena Katkova, Alexey Perkov, Anton Biryukov, Nadezhda Lyapsina, Vyacheslav Sasyuk, Martin Mašek, Petr Janeček, Jan Ebr, Jakub Juryšek, Ronan Cunniffe and Michael Prouza, 11 May 2023, Nature Astronomy . DOI: 10.1038/s41550-023-01972-4

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What’s Made in a Thunderstorm and Faster Than Lightning? Gamma Rays!

A flash of lightning. A roll of thunder. These are normal stormy sights and sounds. But sometimes, up above the clouds, stranger things happen. Our  Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope  has spotted bursts of gamma rays – some of the highest-energy forms of light in the universe – coming from thunderstorms. Gamma rays are usually found coming from objects with crazy extreme physics like  neutron stars  and  black holes . So why is Fermi seeing them come from thunderstorms?

Thunderstorms  form when warm, damp air near the ground starts to rise and encounters colder air. As the warm air rises, moisture condenses into water droplets. The upward-moving water droplets bump into downward-moving ice crystals, stripping off electrons and creating a static charge in the cloud.

The top of the storm becomes positively charged, and the bottom becomes negatively charged,  like two ends of a battery . Eventually the opposite charges build enough to overcome the insulating properties of the surrounding air – and zap! You get lightning.

Scientists suspect that lightning  reconfigures the cloud’s electrical field . In some cases, this allows electrons to rush toward the upper part of the storm at nearly the speed of light. That makes thunderstorms the most powerful  natural particle accelerators  on Earth!

When those electrons run into air molecules, they emit a terrestrial gamma-ray flash, which means that thunderstorms are creating some of the highest energy forms of light in the universe. But that’s not all –  thunderstorms can also produce antimatter ! Yep, you read that correctly! Sometimes, a gamma ray will run into an atom and produce an electron and a positron, which is an electron’s antimatter opposite!

Fermi can spot terrestrial gamma-ray flashes within 500 miles (800 kilometers) of the location directly below the spacecraft. It does this using an instrument called the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor which is primarily used to watch for spectacular flashes of gamma rays coming from the universe.

There are an estimated 1,800 thunderstorms occurring on Earth at any given moment. Over its first 10 years in space, Fermi spotted about 5,000 terrestrial gamma-ray flashes. But scientists estimate that there are  1,000 of these flashes  every day – we’re just seeing the ones that are within 500 miles of Fermi’s regular orbits, which don’t cover the U.S. or Europe.

The map above shows all the flashes Fermi saw between 2008 and 2018. (Notice there’s a blob missing over the lower part of South America. That’s the South Atlantic Anomaly, a portion of the sky where radiation affects spacecraft and causes data glitches.)

Fermi has also spotted terrestrial gamma-ray flashes coming from individual tropical weather systems . In 2014 Tropical Storm Julio produced four flashes in just 100 minutes!

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To set the record straight: Nothing can break the speed of light

By Rahul Rao

Posted on Oct 24, 2022 8:35 AM EDT

5 minute read

Back in 2018, astronomers examining the ruins of two collided neutron stars in Hubble Space Telescope images noticed something peculiar: a stream of bright high-energy ions, jetting away from the merger in Earth’s direction at seven times the speed of light.

That didn’t seem right, so the team recalculated with observations from a different radio telescope. In those observations, the stream was flying past at only four times the speed of light.

That still didn’t seem right. Nothing in the universe can go faster than the speed of light. As it happens, it was an illusion, a study published in the journal Nature explained earlier this month.

[Related: Have we been measuring gravity wrong this whole time? ]

The phenomenon that makes particles in space appear to travel faster than light is called superluminal motion . The phrase fits the illusion: It means “more than light,” but actually describes a trick where an object moving toward you appears much faster than its actual speed. There are high-energy streams out in space there that can pretend to move faster than light—today, astronomers are seeing a growing number of them.

“They look like they’re moving across the sky, crazy fast, but it’s just that they’re moving toward you and across the sky at the same time,” says Jay Anderson, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland who has worked extensively with Hubble and helped author the Nature paper.

To get their jet’s true speed, Anderson and his collaborates compared Hubble and radio telescope observations. Ultimately, they estimated that the jet was zooming directly at Earth at around 99.95 percent the speed of light. That’s very close to the speed of light, but not quite faster than it.

Indeed, to our knowledge so far, nothing on or off our planet can travel faster than the speed of light. This has been proven time and time again through the laws of special relativity , put on paper by Albert Einstein a century ago. Light, which moves at about 670 million miles per hour, is the ultimate cosmic speed limit. Not only that, special relativity holds that the speed of light is a constant no matter who or what is observing it.

But special relativity doesn’t limit things from traveling super close to the speed of light (cosmic rays and the particles from solar flares are some examples). That’s where superluminal motion kicks in. As something moves toward you, the distance that its light and image needs to reach you decreases. In everyday life, that’s not really a factor: Even seemingly speedy things, like a plane moving through the sky above you, don’t move anywhere near the speed of light. 

[Related: Check out the latest version of Boom’s supersonic plane ]

But when something is moving at high speeds at hundreds of millions of miles per hour in the proper direction, the distance between the object and the perceiver (whether it be a person or a camera lens) drops very quickly. This gives the illusion that something is approaching more rapidly than it actually is. Neither our eyes nor our telescopes can tell the difference, which means astronomers have to calculate an object’s actual speed from data collected in images.

The researchers behind the new Nature paper weren’t the first to grapple with superluminal motion. In fact, they’re more than a century late. In 1901, astronomers scanning the night sky caught a glimpse of a nova in the direction of the constellation Perseus. It was the remnants of a white dwarf that ate the outer shells of a nearby gas giant, briefly lighting up bright enough to see with the naked eye. Astronomers caught a bubble inflating from the nova at breakneck speed. But because there was no theory of general relativity at the time, the event quickly faded from memory.

The phenomenon gained buzz again by the 1970s and 1980s. By then, astronomers were finding all sorts of odd high-energy objects in distant corners of the universe: quasars and active galaxies, all of which could shoot out jets of material. Most of the time, these objects were powered by black holes that spewed out high-energy jets almost moving at the speed of the light. Depending on the mass and strength of the black hole they come from, they could stretch for thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of light-years to reach Earth.

As distant objects close in, neither our eyes nor our telescopes can tell the difference, giving us the illusion that they’re moving faster and faster.

Around the same time, scientists studying radio waves began seeing enough faux-speeders to raise alarms. They even found a jet from one distant galaxy that appeared to be racing at nearly 10 times the speed of light . The observations garnered a fair amount of alarm among astronomers, though by then the mechanisms were well-understood.

In the decades since, observations of superluminal motion have added up. Astronomers are seeing an ever-increasing number of jets through telescopes, particularly ones that are floating through space like Hubble or the James Webb Space Telescope. When light doesn’t have to pass through Earth’s atmosphere, their captures can be much higher in resolution. This helps teams find more jets that are farther away (such as from ancient, distant galaxies), and it helps them view closer jets in more detail. “Things stand out much better in Hubble images than they do in ground-based images,” says Anderson. 

[Related: This image wiggles when you scroll—or does it? ]

Take, for instance, the distant galaxy M87 , whose gargantuan central black hole launched a jet that apparently clocked in at between 4 and 6 times the speed of light. By the 1990s, Hubble could actually peer into the stream of energy and reveal that parts it were traveling at different speeds. “You could actually see features in the jet moving, and you could measure the locations of those features,” Anderson explains.

There are good reasons for astronomers to be interested in such breakneck jets, especially now. In the case of the smashing neutron stars from the Nature study, the crash caused a gamma-ray burst , a type of high-energy explosion that remains poorly understood. The event also stirred up a storm of gravitational waves, causing rippled in space-time that researchers can now pick up and observe. But until they uncover some strange new physics in the matter flying through space, the speed of light remains the hard limit.

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China’s enormous Radio Telescope is already picking up mysterious signals – The mysterious Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are energetic radio signals that are much louder than pulsars despite being much further away.

The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), a project that the Chinese government first began planning in 2008, is now fully operational. By the end of September 2019, the $171 million USD (1. 2 billion CNY) FAST project will undergo a last review process, which the Chinese government anticipates will give the go signal to begin studying the skies.

Video advice: NASA

A pulsar is a neutron star that emits beams of radiation that sweep through Earth’s line of sight. Like a black hole, it is an endpoint to stellar evolution. The \”pulses\” of high-energy radiation we see from a pulsar are due to a misalignment of the neutron star’s rotation axis and its magnetic axis. Pulsars seem to pulse from our perspective because the rotation of the neutron star causes the beam of radiation generated within the magnetic field to sweep in and out of our line of sight with a regular period, somewhat like the beam of light from a lighthouse. The stream of light is, in reality, continuous, but to a distant observer, it seems to wink on and off at regular intervals.

Particles travel faster than light in the warped vacuum surrounding pulsars.

Yasemin is a staff writer at Live Science, covering health, neuroscience and biology. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, Science and the San Jose Mercury News. She has a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering from the University of Connecticut and a graduate certificate in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Charged particles travel faster than light through the quantum vacuum of space that surrounds pulsars. As these electrons and protons fly by pulsars, they create the ultrabright gamma-ray flashes emitted by the rapidly twirling neutron stars, new research reveals. These gamma-rays, called Cherenkov emissions, are also found in powerful particle accelerators on Earth, such as the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. The rays are also the source of the bluish-white glow in the waters of a nuclear reactor. (Wacky Physics: The Coolest Little Particles in Nature)But until now, no one thought that pulsar emissions consisted of Cherenkov radiation. That’s in part because of Albert Einstein’s famous theory of relativity, which holds that nothing can travel faster than light in a vacuum. Because of those propositions, scientists previously thought that Cherenkov emissions couldn’t happen in the quantum vacuum of space surrounding pulsars. That area is mostly devoid of matter but home to ghostly quantum particles that flicker in and out of existence.

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astro101 fifnal Flashcards

Start studying astro101 fifnal. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools.

• Terms in this set (61)
• Astronomy Cosmology Quiz, Astronomy Black Holes Qu…
• Physics Test on Tuesday
• Chapter 18 : Astronomy Reading Quiz
• Finals Notes (Ch 18 – 23)
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Upgrade to remove adsOnly RUB 2,325/yearSTUDYFlashcardsLearnWriteSpellTestPLAYMatchGravityTerms in this set (61)magnetars vs neutron star differencesmuch more magnetism, slower rotation. . . bursts of xrays/gamma because of magnetic field decay. active for a very short time, 10k years. apparently considered apulsarneutron star emitting beam(s) of electromagnetic radiation. radiation can only be viewed when pointed at earth. similar to lighthouse only being visible when light is pointed at you. novae that repeat are. . . the least brilliant/violentexplosions of xrays on magnetars are caused byruptures of magnetism on the surface. explosions come from cracks on the surface. the instability strip is where. . . stars that vary in brightness sit. RR Lyrae where it intersects the horizontal strip, Classic Cepheids where it intersects the supergiantsChandrasekhar Limit is. . . The critical mass limit for a white dwarf, 1. 4 solar masses. After this point, the star begins to supernova. kilonovawhen two neutron stars combine, exceeding mass max limit and thus forming a black hole.

Video advice: Tachyon: A faster than light particle

A tachyon or tachyonic particle is a hypothetical particle that always travels faster than light. Most physicists believe that faster-than-light particles cannot exist because they are not consistent with the known laws of physics.

Which form of radiation is the fastest?

Photons travel in harmonic waves at the fastest speed possible in the universe: 186,282 miles per second (299,792,458 meters per second) in a vacuum, also known as the speed of light.

Beta particles have a mass which is half of one thousandth of the mass of a proton and carry either a single negative (electron) or positive (positron) charge. As they have a small mass and can be released with high energy, they can reach relativistic speeds (close to the speed of light).

Which form of radiation is the fastest? What is the speed of a gamma ray? What is the speed of beta rays? Which Ray travels the farthest? Which is faster Alpha or beta? What is the speed of alpha particles? How fast do alpha particles travel? Are gamma rays the fastest? What is the speed of Alpha? How fast do beta particles travel? Is alpha radiation the slowest? Are gamma rays faster than beta? What is the speed of Alpha Beta Beta and gamma particles? What are the properties of alpha beta and gamma rays? What is the mass of a Beta Ray? What are alpha rays?

Does Gamma Travel Faster Than Alpha

Gamma particles travel at the speed of light, they are simply E.M radiation. Beta and alpha particles van both travel at any speed. What is faster gamma or alpha? Alpha.

Microwave is a color of light, too low-energy for you to see, lower-energy even than infrared, but higher-energy than radio. Microwave ovens produce large amounts of this light. Because of the size of the light waves (micrometers, hence the term microwave), they are capable of spinning water molecules as they go past.

What is faster gamma or alpha? Does gamma travel the fastest? Which radiation travels the fastest? Which Ray is fastest? How fast do gamma particles travel? What is the speed of alpha particles? Do gamma waves travel faster than radio waves? Can gamma rays travel faster than light? Which travels faster gamma or radio? Which travels faster through a vacuum infrared or gamma? Which wave travels at the greatest speed? Which among the electromagnetic waves travels fastest slowest? Is alpha radiation the slowest? What is the speed of gamma ray? Does radiation travel faster than the speed of light? What exceeds the speed of light? What can stop gamma particles? Why do alpha particles travel short distances? Which radiation travels at the speed of light? Are jets faster than light? Do all waves travel at the same speed? Are there waves smaller than gamma rays? Are microwaves light?

Particles Moving Faster than Light: Create Super Bright Gamma Rays Circling Pulsars

A new research revealed charged particles travel faster than light through the quantum vacuum of space that surrounds these pulsars. As these electrons and protons fly by pulsars, they create the ultra-bright gamma-ray flashes emitted by the rapidly twirling neutron stars. So, are they the long sought particles that violate Einstein’s law that says nothing can move faster than light? According to co-author Dino Jaroszynski, a professor of physics at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland they do not. Pulsars create crushingly strong electromagnetic fields in the quantum vacuum surrounding the stars. These fields warp, or polarize, the vacuum, essentially creating speed bumps that slow down light particles, Jaroszynski told Live Science. Meanwhile, charged particles such as protons and electrons zoom through these fields, racing past light.

The Hunt for High-Energy Photons Takes Place From a Mountaintop in Mexico

A new telescope built from water tanks might help answer some of the biggest questions in astronomy.

Completed in March 2015, the observatory just recently released its first year of data —a map of the sky revealing about 40 super-bright sources, many from within our Milky Way galaxy. “These are not run-of-the-mill stars,” said physicist Brenda Dingus of Los Alamos National Laboratory, spokesperson for HAWC.

The air over your head is alive with invisible showers. Powerful particles from space are constantly hitting the atmosphere above you, generating a subatomic cascade that shoots downward at near light speed. Figuring out where these downpours originate and what they tell us about the universe is the job of the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory a telescope consisting of 300 giant tanks of purified water placed near the summit of the Sierra Negra volcano in Mexico.

Video advice: 3 Things ‘Faster Than Light’

These 3 things go \”faster\” than the speed of light. How’s that even possible?

Are gamma rays faster than light?

Light of any wavelength, from picometer-wavelength gamma-rays to radio waves more than a trillion times longer , all move at the speed of light in a vacuum.

Do gamma ray bursts travel faster than light?

Cosmic ray bursts produce the most-powerful blasts witnessed since the big bang. New research shows jets formed by these events could travel faster than their local speed of light.

Which particle emits gamma rays?

Gamma rays (γ) are weightless packets of energy called photons . Unlike alpha and beta particles, which have both energy and mass, gamma rays are pure energy. Gamma rays are similar to visible light, but have much higher energy. Gamma rays are often emitted along with alpha or beta particles during radioactive decay.

Does light emit gamma rays?

Gamma-rays are the most energetic form of light and are produced by the hottest regions of the universe.

What is the speed of gamma?

The Gamma rays ( γ- Rays) are also part of the vast EM radiation, so they also travels with the speed of Light c (3 x 10^8 m/s) .

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Can anything travel faster than the speed of light?

Does it matter if it's in a vacuum?

In 1676, by studying the motion of Jupiter's moon Io, Danish astronomer Ole Rømer calculated that light travels at a finite speed. Two years later, building on data gathered by Rømer, Dutch mathematician and scientist Christiaan Huygens became the first person to attempt to determine the actual speed of light, according to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Huygens came up with a figure of 131,000 miles per second (211,000 kilometers per second), a number that isn't accurate by today's standards — we now know that the speed of light in the "vacuum" of empty space is about 186,282 miles per second (299,792 km per second) — but his assessment showcased that light travels at an incredible speed.

According to Albert Einstein 's theory of special relativity , light travels so fast that, in a vacuum, nothing in the universe is capable of moving faster. 

"We cannot move through the vacuum of space faster than the speed of light," confirmed Jason Cassibry, an associate professor of aerospace engineering at the Propulsion Research Center, University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Question answered, right? Maybe not. When light is not in a vacuum, does the rule still apply?

Related: How many atoms are in the observable universe?

"Technically, the statement 'nothing can travel faster than the speed of light' isn't quite correct by itself," at least in a non-vacuum setting, Claudia de Rham, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London, told Live Science in an email. But there are certain caveats to consider, she said. Light exhibits both particle-like and wave-like characteristics, and can therefore be regarded as both a particle (a photon ) and a wave. This is known as wave-particle duality.

If we look at light as a wave, then there are "multiple reasons" why certain waves can travel faster than white (or colorless) light in a medium, de Rham said. One such reason, she said, is that "as light travels through a medium — for instance, glass or water droplets — the different frequencies or colors of light travel at different speeds." The most obvious visual example of this occurs in rainbows, which typically have the long, faster red wavelengths at the top and the short, slower violet wavelengths at the bottom, according to a post by the University of Wisconsin-Madison . 

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When light travels through a vacuum, however, the same is not true. "All light is a type of electromagnetic wave, and they all have the same speed in a vacuum (3 x 10^8 meters per second). This means both radio waves and gamma rays have the same speed," Rhett Allain, a physics professor at Southeastern Louisiana University, told Live Science in an email.

So, according to de Rham, the only thing capable of traveling faster than the speed of light is, somewhat paradoxically, light itself, though only when not in the vacuum of space. Of note, regardless of the medium, light will never exceed its maximum speed of 186,282 miles per second.

Universal look

According to Cassibry, however, there is something else to consider when discussing things moving faster than the speed of light.

"There are parts of the universe that are expanding away from us faster than the speed of light, because space-time is expanding," he said. For example, the Hubble Space Telescope recently spotted 12.9 billion year-old light from a distant star known as Earendel. But, because the universe is expanding at every point, Earendel is moving away from Earth and has been since its formation, so the galaxy is now 28 billion light years away from Earth.

In this case, space-time is expanding, but the material in space-time is still traveling within the bounds of light speed.

Related: Why is space a vacuum?

So, it's clear that nothing travels faster than light that we know of, but is there any situation where it might be possible? Einstein's theory of special relativity, and his subsequent theory of general relativity, is "built under the principle that the notions of space and time are relative," de Rham said. But what does this mean? "If someone [were] able to travel faster than light and carry information with them, their notion of time would be twisted as compared to ours," de Rham said. "There could be situations where the future could affect our past, and then the whole structure of reality would stop making sense."

This would indicate that it would probably not be desirable to make a human travel faster than the speed of light. But could it ever be possible? Will there ever be a time when we are capable of creating craft that could propel materials — and ultimately humans — through space at a pace that outstrips light speed? "Theorists have proposed various types of warp bubbles that could enable faster-than-light travel," Cassibry said.

But is de Rham convinced?

"We can imagine being able to communicate at the speed of light with systems outside our solar system ," de Rham said. "But sending actual physical humans at the speed of light is simply impossible, because we cannot accelerate ourselves to such speed.

"Even in a very idealistic situation where we imagine we could keep accelerating ourselves at a constant rate — ignoring how we could even reach a technology that could keep accelerating us continuously — we would never actually reach the speed of light," she added. "We could get close, but never quite reach it."

Related: How long is a galactic year?

This is a point confirmed by Cassibry. "Neglecting relativity, if you were to accelerate with a rate of 1G [Earth gravity], it would take you a year to reach the speed of light. However, you would never really reach that velocity because as you start to approach lightspeed, your mass energy increases, approaching infinite. "One of the few known possible 'cheat codes' for this limitation is to expand and contract spacetime, thereby pulling your destination closer to you. There seems to be no fundamental limit on the rate at which spacetime can expand or contract, meaning we might be able to get around this velocity limit someday."

— What would happen if the speed of light were much lower?

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Allain is similarly confident that going faster than light is far from likely, but, like Cassibry, noted that if humans want to explore distant planets, it may not actually be necessary to reach such speeds. "The only way we could understand going faster than light would be to use some type of wormhole in space," Allain said. "This wouldn't actually make us go faster than light, but instead give us a shortcut to some other location in space."

Cassibry, however, is unsure if wormholes will ever be a realistic option.

"Wormholes are theorized to be possible based on a special solution to Einstein's field equations," he said. "Basically, wormholes, if possible, would give you a shortcut from one destination to another. I have no idea if it's possible to construct one, or how we would even go about doing it." Originally published on Live Science.

Joe Phelan is a journalist based in London. His work has appeared in VICE, National Geographic, World Soccer and The Blizzard, and has been a guest on Times Radio. He is drawn to the weird, wonderful and under examined, as well as anything related to life in the Arctic Circle. He holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Chester. 

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Do gamma rays travel the speed of light?

Gamma rays travel exactly the speed of light because gamma rays are light

Yup. Everything in the electromagnetic spectrum travels at the same speed.

Gamma have higher frequency. But travel in same speed

No. All electromagnetic wavelengths travel at the same speed, as long as they're all traveling through the same stuff.

Add your answer:

Is it true that gamma rays travel with constant velocity?

Yes. Gamma Rays are photons (like visible light, just at another part of the electromagnetic spectrum). They travel with constant velocity at the speed of light (only in a vacuum). Although the original speed of the gamma ray varies.

How does the speed of visible light compare with the speed of gamma ray?

Both visible light and gamma rays travel at the speed of light in a vacuum, which is approximately 299,792 kilometers per second (or about 186,282 miles per second). Thus, there is no difference in the speed at which visible light and gamma rays travel.

Which ray is the fastest gamma alpha beta?

Gamma rays. Since they are electromagnetic waves, they travel at the speed of light.

Do gama rays travel faster than the speed of light?

Gamma rays are a form of electromagnetic radiation, just as light is, and all EM waves propagate at the speed of light through a vacuum.

Do other forms of radiation from the electromagnetic spectrum also travel at the speed of light?

Yes, all forms of electromagnetic radiation, including gamma rays, X-rays, visible light, ultraviolet light, infrared light, microwaves, and radio waves, travel at the same speed in a vacuum, which is the speed of light.

Why do gamma rays travel at the speed of light?

Gamma rays travel at the speed of light because both light and gamma rays are variants of the same thing: electromagnetic radiation.

Why gamma rays travel as fast as the speed of light?

Because gamma rays are exactly the same thing that light is, only with shorter wavelengths.

What is the speed of gamma rays in air?

Gamma rays travel at the speed of light in air, which is approximately 299,792,458 meters per second.

Why do gamma rays not move faster than light rays due to their shorter wavelength?

because they all travel at the same speed (speed of light)

Are comic rays faster than gamma rays are?

No, gamma rays travel at the speed of light, which is the fastest speed in the universe. Comic rays, on the other hand, are high-energy particles that can approach the speed of light but are not faster than gamma rays.

Which travels faster in a vacuum - gamma rays or infrared rays?

Gamma rays travel faster in a vacuum compared to infrared rays. This is because gamma rays have a higher frequency and shorter wavelength, allowing them to travel at the speed of light. Infrared rays have a lower frequency and longer wavelength, which results in a slower speed when traveling through a vacuum.

Wwhat speed do gamma rays travel at?

Like all forms of light (ie, electro-magnetic radiation), gamma rays in a vacuum travel at exactly 299,792,458 meters per second.

Which travels faster in a vacuum gamma rays or infrared rays?

Gamma rays travel faster than infrared rays in a vacuum because gamma rays have a higher frequency and shorter wavelength than infrared rays. This means that gamma rays have more energy and can move at the speed of light in a vacuum, whereas infrared rays move slower than gamma rays.

Why are delta rays faster than most gamma rays?

Delta rays are faster than gamma rays because they are products of energetic collisions between charged particles and atoms, resulting in electrons moving at high velocities. Gamma rays are electromagnetic radiation that travel at the speed of light and do not have mass, so they move at the speed of light in a vacuum, which is slower than the speed of electrons in matter.

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