Gamma-ray photon race ends in dead heat; Einstein wins this round
Wednesday, October 28, 2009 - 15:42
in Astronomy & Space
Racing across the universe for the last 7.3 billion years, two gamma-ray photons arrived at NASA's orbiting Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope within nine-tenths of a second of one another. The dead-heat finish may stoke the fires of debate among physicists over Einstein's special theory of relativity because one of the photons possessed a million times more energy than the other.