Posted on 10/04/2007 9:33:31 PM PDT by annie laurie
The speed of light is the speed of light, and that's that. Right? Well, maybe not. Try and figure this out. Astronomers studying radiation coming from a distant galaxy found that the high energy gamma rays arrived a few minutes after the lower-energy photons, even though they were emitted at the same time. If true, this result would overturn Einstein's theory of relativity, which says that all photons should move at the speed of light. Uh oh Einstein.
The discovery was made using the new MAGIC (Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov) telescope, located on a mountain top on the Canary island of La Palma. Since gamma rays are blocked by the Earth's atmosphere, astronomers have figured out a clever trick to see them from the ground. When the gamma rays strike the atmosphere, they release a cascade of particles and radiation. The Cherenkov technique detects this cascade, and then works backwards to calculate the direction and energy level of the gamma rays. With a 17-metre detector, MAGIC is the largest telescope of its type.
The international team of researchers pointed the telescope at Markarian 501, a galaxy 500 million light-years away that contains a blazar - a supermassive black hole that periodically releases bursts of gamma rays. More material is falling into the black hole than it can consume, and so it gets squeezed into jets that fire off from the poles of the black hole at close to the speed of light. What astronomers call a "blazar" is when the jets of a supermassive black hole are pointed directly at the Earth.
Researchers sorted high- and low-energy gamma ray photons coming from the blazar with each flareup. Since all the radiation was emitted at the same time, and the speed of light is the speed of light, you would expect the high-energy photons to arrive at the same time. But nope, the high-energy photons showed up around 4 minutes later.
So what's happening? Nobody knows, and this could turn into an entirely new field of physics. The researchers are proposing that maybe the radiation is interacting with "quantum foam". This is a theoretical property of space itself, and predicted by quantum gravity theory - a competitor to string theory.
Original Source: UC Davis News Release
Ping!
Ping of possible interest.
200mg of Vitamin B6 ought to do the trick.
I thought this sounded a little familiar...
Hints of a breakdown of relativity theory?
Scientific American ‘blogs | August 22, 2007 | George Musser
Posted on 08/28/2007 2:24:31 PM EDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1887835/posts
Occam’s Razor : look for simpler reasons. Remember too, there are atmosperic interactions here. To verify this 4 minute delay you need space based gamma ray telescopes free from atmospheric effects. I’m sure that many will look at this and find all sorts of reasons to “save” relativity. I’ll ponder this as a good conundrum to get off to sleep tonight.
4 minutes is an eternity for any explanation based on atmospheric effects local to the Earth. It takes just 8 minutes for light to reach the Earth from the Sun.
On the other hand, .4 minutes is an extremely short period of time, relative to the total distance travelled by those gamma rays.
But there’s no need to draw any final conclusions right away. This result can and should be examined and debated from every angle, probably for years.
There may be a simple explanation : Here you have a narrow jet as a column moving outward at just under light speed. It slams into a cloud of neutral H/He gas. The front is convex, ie, the center punches through, pushing the gas radially outward and accelerating it to near light speed as well. Thus the outer rim of the cylinder is HOT and radiates in the gamma ray portion of the spectrum. At 4 minutes acceleration/delay time that’s about 75,000,000 km for the rim to hang back from the punch-through center of the jet. Thus the diameter of the jet can be inferred.
An alternate explanation is a concave/cup leading edge wherein the rim acts as a cutting knife, forcing the H/He gas into the center of the cup whereby it is accelerated to light speed. Thus it is a compressed mass that hangs back by .5 AU and heated enough to radiate in the gamma ray portion of the spectrum.
Either way there is your 4 minute delay being created in the shock wave of the leading edge of the blazer-jet. To wit, we don’t need to re-write relativity from this one observation, occam’s razor to the rescue...
Markarian 501, a galaxy 500 million light-years away that contains a blazar - a supermassive black hole that periodically releases bursts of gamma raysThat sentence rates a perfect 10 for scientific coolness! It's totally StarTrek-worthy.
That’s NOT an Earth-based explanation. In the scenario you propose, the 4-minute lag would still be seen by an observer in Earth-orbit who measured the gamma rays themselves (which the researchers didn’t do.) [Your initial objection was “...there are atmosperic interactions here. To verify this 4 minute delay you need space based gamma ray telescopes free from atmospheric effects.”]
But it IS an interesting attempt to explain how the 4-minute lag could be created somewhere between Earth and the blazar.
Yes, upon calm/occam razor reflection, it seems most logical that the 4 minute delay of gamma rays vs radio waves is produced right there in the head of the blazar, not in our atmosphere. It then is just a matter of the right geometry, convex or concave head/wave front. We know gamma rays are emitted by accretion discs, sudden collisions like the 20 fragment SL9 comet train impacting Jupiter, etc. Thus it boils down to how that gamma ray producing region lags some .5 AU behind the radio wave region...geometry...new theories not needed.
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