And you thought you couldn't go faster than light Astrophysicists working out of the University of Texas at Brownsville have been studying an interesting pulsar about 10,000 light years away from us (a pulsar is a highly magnetic, spinning corpse of a dead star). Over the course of three days of monitoring, radio waves emitted from the pulsar seem to have been traveling faster than the speed of light. You might have heard that faster-than-light travel is impossible. This is not entirely true -- there are a couple of catches which allow for F.T.L velocities. One such catch, as originally proposed by Mr. Einstein, is that something can travel faster than light if it does not contain information. This physical law has been observed on Earth in experiments, but with this pulsar (if confirmed), this is the first time this sort of thing has been observed off of our planet. What does or does not constitute information in this context however, is the subject of both rigorous study and debate. The radio pulse from the pulsar is suspected to have picked up some of the excess speed by passing through a cloud of neutral hydrogen atoms, which causes the radio waves to increase their electromagnetic wavelength (a process called "anomalous dispersion"). (Note: pictured above is some other pulsar, not Pulsar PSR B1937+21 from this research. Pulsar PSR B1937+21 is the second fastest spinning pulsar yet cataloged, and spins about 642 times around every second.) Source: "Apparent Faster-than-light Pulse Propagation in Interstellar Space..." Section: Technology
So radio waves, which are light, traveled faster than light? Light traveled faster than light? And if that light did travel through whatever cloud that increased its wavelength, I thought wavelength had nothing to do with the speed of light. P.S And a pulsar is not a dead star, it is just a neutron star highly condensed
I hope to read more about this down the road. This would kinda sorta totally rewrite certain types of textbooks.
Im not seeming to understand this, the light from this pulsar, traveled through a group of neutral hydrogem atoms, which are just normal hydrogen atoms, and traveled faster than light......
not the light, the pulsar is emitting radio waves which move at the speed of light. the radio waves are close to the resonance frequency of the neutral frequency of the hydrogen atoms because they are at the same frequency(or close to it)the wave gets a speed boost because the hydrogen is vibrating at the same frequency so in a sense the wave is just skipping the hydrogen so the same instance it hits the front of the atom it is exiting the back just entirely skipping the hydrogen atom. sorry about the length it is the only way i can try to explain this phenomenon
nope it wont because faster than light speeds are not uncommon and not prohibited by any laws of physics general relativity IE: E=MC^2 just means that no object can accelerate past the speed of light. also this phenomenon has been observed before just not outside of a laboratory
No, electromagnetic radiation traveled through a vacuum faster than the constant called c, which under normal circumstances is the speed at which electromagnetic radiation travels through a vacuum. And a neutron star is what you get after certain kinds of stars die in a supernova. You missed the bit where it said that solutions to Einstein's GR predicted this exact sort of behavior.
So what's the speed these things are traveling at? It would be interesting to know how much faster than light they are.
Right but anything with any mass can not travel faster than the speed of light, right? So these are basically conduits of which information can travel, traveling faster than the speed of light information...in a sense? Im confused on how to visualize this
"Radio waves are a type of electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum" Radio waves are light
yes radio waves are a type of light but when you say light people will interpret it as light in the traditional sense of the visible wavelengths of the EM spectrum. because it was identified as a radio pulse i referred to it as such. technically you are correct but most people will assume that you are speaking about "visible light". also neutral hydrogen is not ordinary hydrogen it is hydrogen where the proton and neutron spin in opposite directions