Does the fact that it's in a vacuum matter?
Danish astronomer Ole Rmer determined that light moves at a limited speed in 1676 by observing the motion of Jupiter's moon Io. The American Museum of Natural History(opens in new tab) in New York City claims that two years later, drawing on Rmer's results, Dutch mathematician and physicist Christiaan Huygens made the first effort to measure the true speed of light.
We now know that the speed of light in the "vacuum" of empty space is approximately 186,282 miles per second (299,792 km per second), so Huygens' estimate of 131,000 miles per second (211,000 km per second) is not accurate by today's standards. However, his assessment demonstrated that light travels at an incredible speed.
In a vacuum, nothing in the cosmos can move faster than light, according to Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity.
Jason Cassibry, an associate professor of aerospace engineering at the Propulsion Research Center, University of Alabama in Huntsville, said that humans cannot travel across space faster than the speed of light.
Answered, I presume. perhaps not Does the rule continue to hold true when light is not in a vacuum?
In a non-vacuum environment, at least, the adage "nothing can go faster than the speed of light" isn't completely true, according to Claudia de Rham, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London. She said that there are some limitations to take into account.
Light may be thought of as both a wave and a particle (a photon) since it possesses both wave- and particle-like qualities. We call this wave-particle duality.
According to de Rham, if we consider light to be a wave, there are "many reasons" why certain waves can go through a medium more quickly than white (or colorless) light. She cited the fact that "when light travels through a material, such as glass or water droplets, the different frequencies or hues of light move at different rates," as one such explanation.
According to a blog article by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, rainbows are the clearest visual example of this since they often feature the long, quicker red wavelengths at the top and the short, slower violet wavelengths at the bottom (opens in new tab).
The same is not true, though, when light moves in a vacuum.
"The electromagnetic waves that make up light all travel at the same speed in a vacuum (3 x 108 meters per second). This indicates that the speed of radio waves and gamma rays is equal "Professor of physics at Southeastern Louisiana University, Rhett Allain, informed Live Science through email.
Thus, rather strangely, de Rham claims that the only thing that can travel faster than the speed of light is light itself, but only when it is not in the vacuum of space. It is interesting to note that light will never travel faster than 186,282 miles per second regardless of the medium.
glance everywhere
Cassibry asserts that while talking about objects travelling faster than the speed of light, there is an additional factor to take into account.
He stated that because space-time is expanding, there are areas of the cosmos that are moving away from us more quickly than the speed of light. For instance, the Hubble Space Telescope recently discovered light from the distant star Earendel, whose age is 12.9 billion years old. However, as the universe has been expanding from the beginning, Earendel has been moving away from Earth and is currently 28 billion light years distant.
Although space-time is expanding in this scenario, the objects in it are still moving at or below the speed of light.
