News Revisited

The MAGIC Telescope Collaboration (J.Albert, et al) has reported that the gamma ray photons coming from a distant blazar did not all seem to travel here at the same speed.  They found that lower energy photons arrived here at Earth about 4 minutes before higher energy photons.  If it is true that the photons did not all travel at the same speed and the speed difference was caused by differing energies then Einstein’s theory of relativity may have a problem.  However, these are very preliminary results and the experiment needs to be repeated with other sources.  In addition, there is likely a more mundane answer to this question.

The authors have also proposed that perhaps the photons were interacting with quantum foam.

Here’s an odd one for you.  If you place two beakers of water near each other and apply an electric voltage the water can form a floating bridge between the beakers.  Elmar Fuchs and colleagues, of the Graz University of Technology in Austria, discovered that water will flow from the beaker containing the anode to the beaker containing the cathode without falling to the floor.  Who would have guessed we still don’t really understand this basic material?

For the first time astronomers have measured the velocity of matter in gamma ray bursts.  They say it is moving at 99.9997% of the speed of light, 299,792 kilometers per second, 186,282 miles per second, or a Lorentz factor of 400.

EurekAlert reports astronomers at the ESO La Silla Observatory lead by Emilio Molinari used data from two gamma ray bursts that occurred on April 18 and June 7, 2006 to make this discovery.  These data included rare data about the peaks of the events which was successfully captured by the 0.6 meter REM telescope at ESO La Silla.  It was the peak data that was crucial to directly measuring the velocity, but that data is rarely captured since it occurs so soon after the initial gamma rays are received.  However, the small size of the REM telescope allowed it to slew very quickly to the correct position once the Swift satellite detected the gamma ray bursts (39 and 41 seconds respective