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Most of us grow up familiar with the prevailing law that limits how quickly information can travel through empty space: the speed of light, which tops out at 300,000 kilometers (186,000 miles) per second. While photons themselves are unlikely to ever break this speed limit, there are features of light which don't play by the same rules. Manipulating them won't hasten our ability to travel to the stars, but they could help us clear the way to a whole new class of laser technology. Physicists in the US have shown that, under certain conditions, waves made up of groups of...

A FORMER NASA scientist has claimed time travel is possible because the “speed of light is changing”. ============================================================== Louise Riofrio is involved in a project that will put an atomic clock into the International Space Station to “verify” her theory. She reached the conclusion that the speed of light is changing while working at NASA. The scientist analysed lasers that bounced off reflectors left by astronauts on the moon, which appeared to show the moon was moving too fast. But – when she compared it to various experiments on Earth using fossils, observations of ancient eclipses and computer simulations –...

Welcome to "On This Day ... in Space!" where we peer back in our archives to find historic moments in spaceflight and astronomy. So enjoy a blast from the past with Space.com's Hanneke Weitering to look back at what happened on this day in space! On Nov.  21, 1676, the Danish astronomer Ole Rømer discovered the speed of light . Before Rømer figured it out, scientists thought that light travels instantaneously, or infinitely fast. Rømer disproved this almost by accident when he was studying Jupiter's moon Io. He was trying to figure out how long it takes Io to orbit Jupiter in hopes...

Many scientists firmly believe that our universe and Solar System are billions of years old. However, massive data recorded by 50 years' worth of unmanned probes traversing space shows without a doubt that the planets with their moons and comets are actually very young. Our sun powers through its nuclear fuel, and as such it slowly changes constitution. Famed solar astronomer John A. Eddy was quoted, and others in his field believe billions of years ago the sun was dimmer and thus the Earth became a frozen ball. But Mr. Eddy has also recognized that all our information about the...

Astronomers have just spotted a star whizzing around a vast black hole at about 2.5 times the distance between Earth and the Moon, and it takes only half an hour to complete one orbit. To put that into perspective, it takes roughly 28 days for our Moon to do a single lap around our relatively tiny planet at speeds of 3,683 kilometres (2,288 miles) per hour, meaning this star is moving at some mind-boggling, break-neck speeds.

The speed of light in a vacuum is the ultimate cosmic speed limit. Just getting close to it causes problems: the weird distortions of Einstein’s relativity kick in, so time slows down, lengths go up, masses balloon and everything you thought was fixed changes. Only things that have no mass in the first place can reach light speed – photons of light being the classic example. Absolutely nothing can exceed this cosmic max.We have known about the special nature of light speed since an experiment by US physicists Albert Michelson and Edward Morley in the 1880s. They set two beams...

Researchers suggesting that the speed of light varies have come up with a numerical prediction that will allow their theory to be tested. Many theories in physics are built upon the idea that the speed of light is at a constant rate, but João Magueijo and Niayesh Afshordi think otherwise. In a paper published in the journal Physical Review D, they detailed the creation of an exact figure on the spectral index, a model that can be used to determine if their theory is valid or not. All structures in the universe today were created when fluctuations occurred in the...

Breakthrough Starshot is one of the more exciting scientific ideas that has popped up in the past decade, with its promise to deliver hardware to the nearest star in time for many people currently alive to see it. While the idea would work on paper as an extrapolation of existing technology, there are a lot of details that need to be thoroughly checked out, because it’s possible that one of them could present a show-stopper. There’s a bit of good news there: Breakthrough Starshot is apparently funding the needed research to give its concept a thorough vetting. A recent posting...

The University of Maryland physicist believes the delay could have been because the light was in fact slowed as it travelled due to something known as 'vacuum polarisation'. During this phenomenon, photons break down to something known as ‘positrons’ and electrons for a split second. before combining together again. When they split, quantum mechanics creates a gravitational potential between the pair of ‘virtual’ particles. Dr Franson argues that the process might have a gradual impact on the speed of the photon, meaning that over 168,000 light years, the photons may have suffered a near five-hour delay. If the physicist is...

HOUSTON — Beyond the security gate at the Johnson Space Center’s 1960s-era campus here, inside a two-story glass and concrete building with winding corridors, there is a floating laboratory. Harold G. White, a physicist and advanced propulsion engineer at NASA, beckoned toward a table full of equipment there on a recent afternoon: a laser, a camera, some small mirrors, a ring made of ceramic capacitors and a few other objects. He and other NASA engineers have been designing and redesigning these instruments, with the goal of using them to slightly warp the trajectory of a photon, changing the distance it...

HOUSTON — Beyond the security gate at the Johnson Space Center’s 1960s-era campus here, inside a two-story glass and concrete building with winding corridors, there is a floating laboratory. Harold G. White, a physicist and advanced propulsion engineer at NASA, beckoned toward a table full of equipment there on a recent afternoon: a laser, a camera, some small mirrors, a ring made of ceramic capacitors and a few other objects. He and other NASA engineers have been designing and redesigning these instruments, with the goal of using them to slightly warp the trajectory of a photon, changing the distance it...

Two new studies to be published in the European Physical Journal D demonstrate that the speed of light is variable in real space. Textbook explanations of the speed of light assume that light travels in a vacuum, but space is not a vacuum. … It is not expected that the small variation in the speed of light which has been found will affect the universally accepted theories of particle physics and quantum mechanics to a large extent. However, the studies are proof that the speed of light may be variable, and shows that the mathematical treatments that have long been...

A discovery that promises transistors – the fundamental part of all modern electronics – controlled by laser pulses that will be 10,000 faster than today's fastest transistors has been made by a Georgia State University professor and international researchers. Professor of Physics Mark Stockman worked with Professor Vadym Apalkov of Georgia State and a group led by Ferenc Krausz at the prestigious Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics and other well-known German institutions.There are three basic types of solids: metals, semiconductors, used in today's transistors, and insulators – also called dielectrics.Dielectrics do not conduct electricity and get damaged or break...

Faulty wiring has been proposed as the glitch that caused a European physics experiment to clock particles flying faster than light. Scientists at Italy’s OPERA experiment reported in September that nearly weightless particles called neutrinos were apparently traveling from the CERN laboratory on the Swiss-French border to an underground detector in Italy, 730 kilometers away, faster than the speed of light. The apparent violation of Einstein’s theory of special relativity immediately produced a chorus of theorists offering reasons why neutrinos simply could not be going that fast (SN: 11/5/11, p. 10). “It was always clear to me that the results...

The CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva has confirmed Wednesday's report that a loose fiber-optic cable may be behind measurements that seemed to show neutrinos outpacing the speed of light. But the lab also says another glitch could have caused the experiment to underestimate the particles' speed. In a statement based on an earlier press release from the OPERA collaboration, CERN said two possible "effects" may have influenced the anomalous measurements. One of them, due to a possible faulty connection between the fiber-optic cable bringing the GPS signals to OPERA and the detector's master clock, would have caused the experiment...

Rick Perry established a new gold standard for hawkish foreign policy at Saturday night’s GOP debate in New Hampshire. Not only is he mad President Obama withdrew US forces, he wants to put them back on the ground there immediately. “I would send troops back into Iraq,” Rick Perry told a New Hampshire audience at Saturday night’s GOP debate, warning that without yet another military operation in Iraq it would fall under the influence of neighboring Iran. “I think it’s a huge error for us,” he said. “We’re going to see Iran in my opinion, move back in at literally...

A second experiment at the European facility that reported subatomic particles zooming faster than the speed of light -- stunning the world of physics -- has reached the same result, scientists said late Thursday. The "positive outcome of the [second] test makes us more confident in the result," said Fernando Ferroni, president of the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics, in a statement released late Thursday. Ferroni is one of 160 physicists involved in the international collaboration known as OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion Tracking Apparatus) that performed the experiment. While the second experiment "has made an important test of consistency...

An independent experiment confirms that subatomic particles have wrong energy spectrum for superluminal travel. The claim that neutrinos can travel faster than light has been given a knock by an independent experiment. On 17 October, the Imaging Cosmic and Rare Underground Signals (ICARUS) collaboration submitted a paper1 to the preprint server arXiv.org, in which it offered a rebuttal of claims2 to have clocked subatomic particles called neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light. The original results were published on 22 September by the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Tracking Apparatus (OPERA) experiment. Both experiments are based at Gran Sasso National Laboratory...

Neutrinos—ghostly subatomic particles—may have been observed traveling faster than the speed of light, scientists announced this week. If confirmed, the astonishing claim would upend a cardinal rule of physics established by Albert Einstein nearly a century ago. "Most theorists believe that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. So if this is true, it would rock the foundations of physics," said Stephen Parke, head of the theoretical physics department at the U.S. government-run Fermilab near Chicago, Illinois.

An international team of scientists has recorded neutrino particles traveling faster than the speed of light, a spokesman for the researchers said on Thursday -- in what could be a challenge to one of the fundamental rules of physics. If confirmed, the discovery would overturn a key part of Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that nothing in the universe can travel faster than light.