GRB080319B? (in Off-topic)

Nobody's posted about this yet... hm...

Last week (the 19th) there was apparently a gamma ray burst in the middle of the night.

This isn't necessarily unusual, but what is unusual is that, if you were looking at the right spot at the right time, you would have been able to see it with your naked eye.

What's even more extraordinary is that this explosion took place 7.5 billion light years away! (That means it took the light 7.5 billion years to reach us -- the Earth is only about 4.5 billion years old. This explosion happened 3 billion years before the Earth came into existence, and you could have seen it!)

Here's the NASA press release for more information... have a nice day :-)

Interesting.... o.o

CONSPIRACY! It was no "gamma burst", that story is just a cover up to throw off people who may have seen this incident and knew it for what it really was...
A UFO destroyed by a secret government agency as it was nearing Earth's atmosphere!!! Take heed my fellow CBian's, THEY know we're here and they want our quickly warming planet!


/me sits in the corner with his tin foil helm of durin on.

interesting article tho.

whats sad j'bob is i can actually picture you doing that...

good article though :-)

Wow...thats confusing.

I've always wondered...
So technically, if you could travel faster than the speed of light, and you were watching the earth as you flew away from it, could you "go back in time" and see the earth's past? by running past the waves of light that were emmitted from the earth?

Thats is really confusing to understand...
I've always wondered...
So technically, if you could travel faster than the speed of light, and you were watching the earth as you flew away from it, could you "go back in time" and see the earth's past? by running past the waves of light that were emmitted from the earth?

If you can go faster than the speed of light, then, theoretically, you have something that has infinite energy (and mass, if you're speaking relativity). I simply cannot imagine this. (How can you have an object with infinite mass and infinite energy?)

As far as experimental goes, even particle accelerators cannot exceed the speed of light, though they can get up to at least 10^5 (estimated) places of 9's to the ratio of the speed of light. In other words, they can get up to 0.99999xxx times the speed of light. Nobody (or nothing?) has been able to go faster than the speed of light.

I don't think it's possible to go faster than the speed of light, based on Einsteins E=mc^2 you would turn into energy, or the extra energy would turn into mass or something like that. :P I'm not aware of the physics.

And if you were going faster than the speed of light somehow, you wouldn't see anything because light would never reach your eyes.

I think that if you were somehow able to go faster than the speed of light, you would not be able to see the past. What would happen is you would be able to see a playback in reverse of what happened once you started to go past the speed of light and stop to look back at what you want to see.
I'm not certain about the specifics, but what happens in the particle accelerators is that the energy of the particle, can continue to travel down the length of the accelerator, but have the particle itself not exist. I think that has something to do with the infinite mass, energy thing.

"And if you were going faster than the speed of light somehow, you wouldn't see anything because light would never reach your eyes."

The light would reach your eyes, but it would be light that was from the past. Imagine sending a bunch of waves along a calm ocean. As you sent the last wave, you started moving in the direction you sent the waves, at a velocity faster than the waves are moving. You wouldn't see the last wave you sent, but you would see the waves you sent earlier. If you stopped and waited, eventually the last wave you sent would catch up to you and you would see it.

Now, as others have pointed out, with our current knowledge of the universe, it is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, so the entire point is moot, but if we could travel faster than the speed of light, then yes, you could see into the past.