That idea is a key foundation of modern physics, and it has withstood more than 100 years of intense scrutiny. "You could say it's peanuts, but it's not," says Ereditato, "It's something that we can measure rather accurately with a small uncertainty."Įinstein's 1905 special theory of relativity states that c, the speed of light, is a sort of "cosmic speed limit" - that nothing in the universe moves faster than light, which travels at 186,282 miles per second. Light travels the 454 miles from CERN to Gran Sasso in 2.4 thousandths of a second, and the neutrinos beat that time by 60 nanoseconds, or 60 billionths of a second, the scientists say. The announcement made international headlines. How much faster than light did the neutrinos travel? According to the group's findings, neutrinos made the 731-kilometre journey 60 nanoseconds faster than predicted if they had travelled at light speed. But their speed "is becoming a main issue," says OPERA leader Antonio Ereditato, dryly. The team studied more than 15,000 neutrino events and found that they indicate that the neutrinos travel at a velocity 20 parts per million above the speed of light.
The OPERA team fires muon neutrinos from the Super Proton Synchrotron at CERN in Geneva a distance of 730 km under the Alps to a detector in Gran Sasso, Italy. And they travel effortlessly "through walls and planets like wind through a screen door." Over three years, the OPERA team fired 15,000 beams of neutrinos underground from CERN to the subterranean Gran Sasso laboratory south of Rome - primarily to study the shifting properties of neutrinos, not the speed at which they travel. But now physicists working on the OPERA experiment in Italy may have found tantalizing evidence that neutrinos can exceed the speed of light.
They're "among the weirdest denizens of the weird quantum subatomic world," says Dennis Overbye in The New York Times. The left waveform is the measured distribution of protons, and the right that of the detected OPERA neutrinos. Neutrinos are virtually invisible, shape-shifting particles. The red lines are the CERN Neutrinos to Gran Sasso (CNGS) beam to the LNGS lab where the OPERA detector is. Washington: Neutrinos really travel faster than light, Italian scientists, who had recently detected the phenomenon, claimed following postive outcomes from.
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