Planet sized objects moving at 99.9% the speed of light

I found this rather interesting, imagiane how much energy it takes to do this.

SAN DIEGO -- If you're light, it's fairly easy to travel at your own speed -- that is to say 186,282 miles per second or 299,800 kilometers per second.

But if you are matter, then it's another matter altogether.

Nothing we know of zips along more quickly than light. Einstein, nearly 100 years ago, said it's not possible. For us, the speed limit makes strange sense: Go faster than light, and you could return before you've left, become your own grandpa, or other perform other leaps of cosmic logic.

Fast forward a century. Astronomers are now measuring stuff -- material, matter, things -- that moves at so close to the speed of light you might think it'd make Einstein a bit nervous. His theory of relativity appears not to be endangered by the blazing speeds, though.

www.space.com...

Its not just particles either some of them have the mass of planets

At 99.9% light speed shouldn't the mass be approaching infinite. (Yeah I know you cant approach infinity) Any science geeks out there want to splain this? Did the Jupiter sized mass the article speaks of start out really tiny and gain mass through acceleration?

Whoever said that light dictated the "absolute cosmic speed limit" as represented by the American Astronomical Society, anyway?

They are being voyeuristic towards a few blazars. It's what they cannot see that is moving faster than Einstein predicted.

"See" being the operative word, a biological condition brought about by adaptation to light in the first place.

Originally posted by deevee
At 99.9% light speed shouldn't the mass be approaching infinite. (Yeah I know you cant approach infinity) Any science geeks out there want to splain this?

Thats what I was hoping for. I cant even begin to figure how much energy it would take to do it.

Originally posted by deevee
At 99.9% light speed shouldn't the mass be approaching infinite. (Yeah I know you cant approach infinity) Any science geeks out there want to splain this? Did the Jupiter sized mass the article speaks of start out really tiny and gain mass through acceleration?

wouldnt mass in that context refer to weight/density rather than size? something to do with gravity force? complex stuff.

Here is the quote

"To accelerate a bowling ball to the speed newly measured in these blazars would require all the energy produced in the world for an entire week," Piner said. "And the blobs of plasma in these jets are at least as massive as a large planet."

I would take it he means size

No he didn't. Mass and size are totally different(well actaully they are not but for arugments sake lets assume they are).

Size is governed by two things. Mass and Density. Black Holes are very Dense and very massive at the same time making them really small for thier Mass and Density. If said Black Hole had less density with the same mass the object would get bigger. Understand?

Originally posted by deevee
At 99.9% light speed shouldn't the mass be approaching infinite. (Yeah I know you cant approach infinity) Any science geeks out there want to splain this? Did the Jupiter sized mass the article speaks of start out really tiny and gain mass through acceleration?

No, you are confusing size with mass.. and while I'm much too tired to break out the whole relativity thing, suffice it to say, it's all relative

On a more serious note, a poster here made a very good comment about what we can 'see' and can't 'see'... it's entirely possible that matter moving faster than what is commonly accepted to be the speed of light may not be detectable.

Gravitons (should they exist) may well move faster than the speed of light..

Personally, my money is on A.E. being partially wrong, just as Newton was.. i.e. correct to a certain point and then something else too difficult to understand and/or measure at the time the theory was put forward becomes evident and it all goes out the window.

Osiris

Personally, my money is on A.E. being partially wrong, just as Newton was.. i.e. correct to a certain point and then something else too difficult to understand and/or measure at the time the theory was put forward becomes evident and it all goes out the window.

I believe that A.E being partially wrong is a dead certainty. We can't have two sets of laws governing the Universe. Those being General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. They cannot mesh so to speak because we do not know how gravity ties into QM now do we? Trans-Dimensional/Universal Gravitons is just one of many theories trying to Unify the forces. Another is Quantum Loop gravity I believe derived from M-Theory.

Now what about Tachyons. I have been told that they are just a tool that Theoretical Physists use, but a former tool the Higgs Boson exists so in my mind if the Higgs Boson can exist so there is a chance that Tachyons exists as well. Have no idea how we'd detect them but then again I'm sure people in the 1800s who theorized about energetic particles never saw how they'd be able to detect them.

[edit on 18-1-2005 by sardion2000]

I heard it suggested once that the speed of light is the fastest observable speed in the universe. At least with our current, publicly known, technologies. And this seems a good point to me.

I have also read that perhaps the universe isn't expanding. The doppler shift that's so well known for sound does not analogize with light as has been suggested - relativity itself blows that away, because no matter how fast you are going relative to anything else, light is still going the speed of light - it is immune to the effects of time or time dilation. Instead, molecular hydrogen throughout the universe is responsible for the absorption and shifting of light from distant galaxies. In that case, redshift is an effective means of calculating distance, but not expansion.

Let me toss one more in here - I've heard a lot of theories tested against the known laws of physics. If it violates the law, then the theory must be invalid. However, let me throw a wrench in that. Consider zero-point energy. In the vast vacuum of space, virtual particle pairs are constantly zinging in and out of existance. Hawking radiation occurs when that virtual particle pair occurs at the event horizon of a black hole (let's assume he's right on this one - if he isn't, this argument may be moot). When the antiparticle gets sucked into the black hole, and the particle gets tossed into the universe, have we not just created energy? And since the black hole theoretically evaporates as a result of this process, not only are we increasing energy in the universe, but destroying the energy of the black hole, since they are physically seperate.

I'm wondering how we validated these laws of physics - shouldn't they also constantly be on trial? Any thoughts on that?

[edit on 1/18/2005 by Phoenycks]

Ok, I know I'm the single worst ameteur physcist of our generation, but humor me and you may educate a lot of other people at the same time.

Why exactly can't you move faster than light? I have seen a few illustrations that I don't feel like I fully understood, but the only consequence of violating light speed that I could really figure out was basically a "photo boom" (like sonic boom).

The biggest weakness to my logic as far as I can tell is that I don't see time as a dimension. I don't claim to know better than scientists, I'm just not personally convinced as far as my own limited reasoning on the matter is concerned. If we assume that time is not a dimension, but is the result of observations in change, then one could accelerate at any speed without being said to travel in time and would eventually hit a speed barrier imposed by the finite nature of fractions- you can't reduce the change that occurs during your travel by half infinitely because you should theoretically get to a lowest unit of existence- probably at the level of whatever fabric it is through which an electron moves as it circles its atom. Therefore you couldn't travel instantly if my assumptions are correct and the only way the light barrier would continue to hold then is if light were happened to be moving at the fastest rate allowed by the above speculated principles.

As for why I don't belive time is a dimension...
If time were a dimension, then theoretically speaking those things containing the least energy should theoretically be "outrun" by the things around them over an astronomical timeline causing an accumulation of mass behind us in time and creating gravitational pull on that dimension, slowing progress further and creating a "curve" in time as measured by half-life. For example extremely old sources of elements with extremely long halflifes should have decayed more than we would expect due to recent loss of speed due to the mass accumulating behind them and its influence.

So... somebody tell me why I'm wrong, or (god forbid) if i theoretically have an astronomical chance of being right.

Well i was reading this the other day, its way over my head but im sure some of you will get it better than I

www.wsws.org...

Also the speed of light is not a constant either, from what i have read in other publications it would appear as though light actually travels slower now than it did at the conception of the universe (i "think" it was something like 1.5 times what its current speed is).

Again, didnt they detect some kind of particle that has mass and travels faster than light a few years ago in one of those huge underground water things that records flashs of light when the water molecules are hit by these faster than light particles? Ill see if i can find a link prehaps.

One last thing, i remember reading somewhere that they were able to speed up a beam of light itself somehow by passing it through a cloud of specially charge argon gas, when something like 300x its original speed. I will try to find a link for this too.

Dont trust anything i have said here till i find a link for each, cause i could be in error. Will post back as soon as i find some

IIRC, travelling at light speed requires infinite energy. So I think something can approach light speed asymptotically, but it can never actually reach light speed.

If a very small mass somehow became a large mass, then where did the new particles/atoms come from and when it slows down, where do they go? What would the new particles be made of?

I wonder, what slows down the photons coming from headlights of a car if light speed ( C )+ 160km/h is not possible?

Originally posted by deevee
At 99.9% light speed shouldn't the mass be approaching infinite. (Yeah I know you cant approach infinity) Any science geeks out there want to splain this? Did the Jupiter sized mass the article speaks of start out really tiny and gain mass through acceleration?

This is the exact question that came to my mind as well.... Wouldn't this thing pack one heck of a punch to the first solid thing in its path ? I wonder if there is a planet sized ball of plasma screaming thru space with our name on it .

No impact craters to study with this baby !

Originally posted by Super Strokey
Again, didnt they detect some kind of particle that has mass and travels faster than light a few years ago in one of those huge underground water things that records flashs of light when the water molecules are hit by these faster than light particles? Ill see if i can find a link prehaps.

One last thing, i remember reading somewhere that they were able to speed up a beam of light itself somehow by passing it through a cloud of specially charge argon gas, when something like 300x its original speed. I will try to find a link for this too.

They have exceeded the speed of light by a phenomenon known as Quantum Tunneling. But I don't know by what multiplier.

[MIND]Among thee speed demons of the universe are Jupiter-sized blobs of hot gas embedded in streams of material ejected from hyperactive galaxies known as blazars.
"To accelerate a bowling ball to the speed newly measured in these blazars would require all the energy produced in the world for an entire week," Piner said. "And the blobs of plasma in these jets are at least as massive as a large planet."[/BOOGLES]

I really dislike smileys but

Originally posted by deevee
At 99.9% light speed shouldn't the mass be approaching infinite. (Yeah I know you cant approach infinity) Any science geeks out there want to splain this? Did the Jupiter sized mass the article speaks of start out really tiny and gain mass through acceleration?

Mass is supposed to increase with an increase in speed. I suppose that 99.99999999 percent of the speed of light isn't close enough to make it disasterously massive? Sounds weird to put it like that tho.

From my understanding, no actual physical object consisting of particles can surpass the speed of light, because it is impossible to remain in a physical state and do so; you'd be torn to pieces. Only non-matter can reach the speed of light (as far as I have read).

Originally posted by Broadsword20068
From my understanding, no actual physical object consisting of particles can surpass the speed of light, because it is impossible to remain in a physical state and do so; you'd be torn to pieces. Only non-matter can reach the speed of light (as far as I have read).

Well not nesesarily Non-Matter, just Massless Matter which as we know doesn't really exist in nature, but what if we do create Massless matter, what then? We know so little about the universe right now, that its a dead certainty that we got alot of our "Laws" Wrong, or only Partially Right. I say wait until a unified field theory gets validated then start to make assumptions on what is possible and what is not. It's still too early IMHO.