Heeck detailed his findings online July 11 in the journal Physical Review Letters.įollow us Facebook& Google+. The speed of light may not necessarily be constant. ![]() This means that if photons live for 1 quintillion years, from their perspective, they will only live about three years. Imagine the following thought-experiment: We flip a switch, and a signal is conveyed to a bulb at a speed 5/3 the speed of lightnearly 70 faster than light could transmit the signal. No laws of physics were broken, but light seems to have moved faster than its speed limit. Einstein's theory of relativity suggests when particles travel extraordinarily quickly, the fabric of space and time warps around them, meaning they experience time as passing more slowly than objects moving relatively slowly. Intriguingly, the speed that photons travel at means their extraordinary life spans will pass by quickly from their perspective. Einstein's theory of relativity "just states that no particle can travel faster than a massless particle," Heeck said. However, this assumption is based on the idea of the photon not having any mass. The idea of neutrinos that move faster than photons would seem to violate the notion, based on Einstein's theory of relativity, that nothing can travel faster than light. "The lightest neutrino, being lighter than light, would then actually travel faster than photons," Heeck said. In Einstein’s theory of special relativity, only massless particles like the photon travel at the. In principle, each photon might decay into two of the lightest neutrinos. Tachyons are hypothetical particles that travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. "It might well be that the neutrino is lighter than the photon," Heeck said. Countless neutrinos rush through everyone on Earth every day with no effect. The US Department of Defense funded a series of. Neutrinos are ghostly particles that only very rarely interact with normal matter. A 1998 illustration of a spacecraft using negative energy to warp space-time and travel faster than light. But we neither speculate here nor do we discuss personal theories. ![]() As we dont know what it is made of, we can only speculate. Therefore it cant travel at, and nothing does travel faster than the speed of light. Assuming photons have mass, "there is only one particle we know from the Standard Model of particle physics that might be even lighter - the lightest of the three neutrinos," Heeck said. Dark matter interacts by gravitation, so it has nonzero mass. If photons do break down, the results of such decay must be even lighter particles, ones that would travel even faster than photons. (Lighter regions have more mass and darker have less.) (Image credit: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech) Here, a full-sky map from Planck showing matter between Earth and the edge of the observable universe. Scientific projects such as the Planck mission, aimed at measuring the afterglow of the Big Bang, could potentially detect signs of the decay of photons.
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