hubble space telescope

Astronomers were fascinated by the high-energy jet emitted from the collision site of two neutron stars.

In 2018, astronomers studying the impact of two colliding neutron stars noticed something strange in Hubble images. It was a stream of bright, high-energy beams that shot from the collision site toward Earth at seven times the speed of light.

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Of course, they didn’t think so, so the entire team around astronomer BP Abbott made a series of calculations using observations from another radio telescope to adjust their measurement to four times the speed of light. But this still did not seem like the right result, because even on the basis of Einstein’s theories, there is a general belief that nothing can move faster than a ray of light in space, so other experts took up the observation. Including Kunal P. Mooley, who addressed the phenomenon in his own study. He published the conclusions in the journal Nature and confirmed through them that, at least for now, light remains the fastest element in the universe.

As it turns out, it was an illusion, and behind it all is a phenomenon that causes particles in space to appear to be moving faster than light. It is an illusion of so-called superluminal movement, and this term really fits it. It actually describes a situation where an object moving towards you appears to be moving much faster than its actual speed. There are high-energy currents in space that can affect measurements in this way, and astronomers are observing more and more of them today.

A space trick

“They look like they’re moving across the sky at crazy speeds, but that’s just because they’re moving towards us, but we’re still observing them at a great distance,” says Jay Anderson, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland who participated in the aforementioned study in the journal Nature. To find out the true speed of the jets, Anderson and his colleagues compared several observations. Finally, they estimated that the rays approach Earth directly at about 99.95 percent of the speed of light. This is very close to the speed of light, but not quite faster than it.

So the theory of relativity, which Albert Einstein came up with a hundred years ago, is still valid. Light, which travels at approximately 670 million kilometers per hour, is the final limit of cosmic speed. Not only that, the theory of relativity states that the speed of light is constant regardless of who or what is observing it.

Source: Popular Science, APS, Nature