Gamma-ray photon race ends in dead heat; Einstein wins this round

Description

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.

For Einstein's theory, that's no problem. In his vision of the structure of space and time, unified as space-time, all forms of electromagnetic radiation - gamma rays, radio waves, infrared, visible light and X-rays - are reckoned to travel through the vacuum of space at the same speed, no matter how energetic. But in some of the new theories of gravity, space-time is considered to have a "shifting, frothy structure" when viewed at a scale trillions of times smaller than an electron. Some of those models predict that such a foamy texture ought to slow down the higher-energy gamma-ray photon relative to the lower energy one. Clearly, it did not.

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