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Astronomers have detected a gargantuan blast of energy from space that appears to be doing the impossible: Traveling seven times faster than the speed of light.
This is, of course, an optical illusion — a rare and mind-boggling phenomenon called superluminal motion, which occurs when particles come very close to moving at the speed of light. In this case, scientists detected a jet of energy blasting out of a stellar collision site at a staggering 99.97% of the speed of light — about 670 million mph (1.07 billion km/h), according to a study published Oct. 12 in the journal Nature (opens in new tab).
The jet in question is the result of a cosmic cataclysm that first made waves in the scientific community in 2017. That year, scientists detected a violent collision between two neutron stars — ultra-dense, collapsed star cores that pack a sun’s-worth of mass into a ball no wider than a city — located roughly 140 million light-years from Earth. The collision was so powerful it created ripples in the fabric of space-time; such disturbances are known as gravitational waves.
Albert Einstein predicted the existence of these space-time ripples in 1916, and it took scientists 100 years to find the evidence to prove it, following a collision between two black holes that was detected in 2016. The gravitational waves released by the colliding neutron stars in 2017 — a signal named GW17081 — were the first to be detected from a source other than black holes, proving that more than one type of cosmic catastrophe is capable of creating them.
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A jet of particles blasts out of a black hole at near-light-speed. A similar jet was just detected from a pair of colliding neutron stars, seemingly breaking the laws of physics. (Image credit: NASA Goddard)
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