Breakdown of relativity? (also MAGIC delayed photon)
Via SciAm online: http://blog.sciam.com/index.php?titl...&c=1&tb=1&pb=1
Quote:
The MAGIC gamma-ray telescope team has just released an eye-popping preprint (following up earlier work) describing a search for an observational hint of quantum gravity. What they've seen is that higher-energy gamma rays from an extragalactic flare arrive later than lower-energy ones.
The team studied two gamma-ray flares in mid-2005 from the black hole at the heart of the galaxy Markarian 501. They compared gammas in two energy ranges, from 1.2 to 10 tera-electron-volts (TeV) and from 0.25 to 0.6 TeV. The first group arrived on Earth four minutes later than the second. One team member, physicist John Ellis of CERN, says: "The significance of the time lag is above 95%, and the magnitude of the effect is beyond the sensitivity of previous experiments."
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The original paper is here: http://arxiv.org/abs/0708.2889
I'm not clear on why these results imply the effects of quantum gravity. The blog entry says that the authors ruled out difference in timing of release of the higher energy gamma-rays vs. lower-energy gamma-rays as a cause of the time delay.
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