There are a lot of ways for a 60 nanosecond or 60 foot (light speed is about 1 foot per nanosecond) error to creep into an experiment involving a beam of “ghost particles” traveling 730km, from CERN to Gran Sasso, that produces no more than one or two data points at a time. You generate a fantastic number in beam-form somewhere, fire it many times through the Earth at a detector far away and, with luck, you’ll detect one. When you’re talking about neutrinos you’re usually talking about just a couple of data points. In this case it’s very likely to be an error. Faster than light claims have always (so far…) turned out to be a hoax, or a misunderstanding, or an error. These sorts of things crop up every few months, with varying credibility, but the credibility of this group is higher than most. To add to that, some supernovas can take few months to get to their peak brightness.Physicist: The story here is that CERN has been generating neutrinos, firing them 730km, to a detector in Gran Sasso, Italy, and those neutrinos have been consistently (so far as their instruments say) arriving 60 ns (0.00000006 seconds) earlier than they should. So the neutrinos will have a few hours advantages to the visible explosion, and depending on the star size (how many hours between the core collapse and the actual explosion) the advantage the neutrinos have will vary as eventually light will surpass the neutrinos which travel very close to the speed of light. But the shockwave wall take a few hours to reach the star surface where the star will explode then and then be able to be seen, how many hours depends on the star size, so for neutrinos, this can be just 13.4-13.5 seconds (13.3 at c). And before the huge explosion happens the core will start collapsing under its own gravity, this collapse happens in less than a second (simulation says less than 250ms) generating an immense amount of Neutrinos which will take a few seconds to get out of the whole star into the space. I am just a layman with an interest in the subject, however, so I could be representing these ideas inaccurately.Ī pre-supernova star is huge, really huge, a 9 solar mass star size can reach 8 million km (4 million km from the core to the surface). There's also a third, speculated contributing factor as to why light in a supernova can be further delayed, and that's the photons are spontaneously self-annihilating into virtual electron-positron pairs and then recombining, and gravity is acting between the pair and contributing to the perceived delay. The photons generated there can escape, and we eventually observe them.Īdditionally, light is slowed in any transparent medium, because it is an electromagnetic wave, and when it interacts with a denser medium, that wave interacts with electrons in the medium, which produces another, secondary electromagnetic wave, which interferes with and slows the original wave. Then that event slowly propagates to the outer shell of the star, and the photons we see are a result of that event reaching the outer layers of the star. First is the event at the core of the star that generates the neutrinos, which ignore the matter of the star for the most part while the photons do not. So we are observing two different events. That mass doesn't stop the neutrinos, though. There's an impenetrable mass of star between us and them. They aren't escaping at all on the timeframes we're discussing. ![]() The photons generated at the core along with the neutrinos aren't the photons we are observing.
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