I've suggested a new theory called quantised inertia (or MiHsC) that explains inertia as horizons damping quantum fields. It predicts galaxy rotation & lab thrusts without dark stuff or adjustment. My University webpage is here, I've written 4 books, see below right. Pls subscribe at patreon: here or support me at My Paypal
Showing posts with label galactic jets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label galactic jets. Show all posts

Tuesday, 26 August 2014

Breaking the speed of light limit?


Special relativity says that as you accelerate, say, a spaceship, towards the speed of light its inertial mass increases so it gets harder to push it any faster. At the speed of light its inertial mass is infinite so you can't increase its speed at all. Hence relativity predicts a speed of light speed limit. However, MiHsC makes a slight correction to this. The wavelength of the Unruh radiation that causes inertia in MiHsC lengthens as the acceleration reduces which means that, for the spaceship case above, as the speed levels off and acceleration tends to zero near the speed of light, the Unruh waves making up its inertia exceed the Hubble-scale and cannot be observed. This means, using the philosophy of Mach that special relativity itself was based on, these waves should dissapear, and the spaceship's inertial mass should reduce. Indeed, putting MiHsC and relativity together (in a very preliminary way) you can show that there remains a residual relativity-proof acceleration of 2*(speed of light)^2/(Hubble scale) even at the speed of light: this is the minimum acceleration allowed by MiHsC. Interestingly this is close to the cosmic acceleration that has recently been observed and is usually explained in an ad hoc manner by dark energy.

For such a claim of course, far more direct evidence needs to be found. There are ways in which observations of quantum systems demand non-locality and superluminal information transfer (Bell's inequalities), but my favourite possibility at the moment involves the more direct evidence of galactic jets. Looking at the movement of blobs of light within the jets streaming out along the spin axes of galactic cores and quasars, and knowing the distance of these objects, it is possible to show that these blobs appear to move faster than light (eg: Porcas, 1983, Biretta, 1999). Before we get too excited, Martin Rees (1966) showed that light-emitting objects moving at sublight speeds can appear to travel faster than light if they are moving at a small angle to our line of sight. However, that being so, one would expect the jets that show faster than light speeds to all be apparently 'shorter' since they should be pointing towards us, but it has been shown that they are not shorter on average than all the other ones, which implies that they are not on average close to our line of sight. A particular case is M87 (Biretta et al., 1999). The blobs of light in its jet are moving at six times the speed of light. To explain this away as the Rees effect one would need this jet to be within 20 degrees of our line of sight, but an analysis suggests that this angle is 44-64 degrees, and to get it within 20 degrees would 'present several problems' (Biretta et al., 1999).

I know this is a horrifically complex area to get into, and causality will have to be thought about too which means that thinking about it is rather like taking an axe to the floor one is standing on, but I do think this is important, doubly so since I'm one of the few arguing that FTL (Faster Than Light) is possible. I've had some problems publishing anything on this. I've submitted papers, and I gave a talk on MiHsC and FTL at the 100 Year Starship Symposium in Orlando in 2011, and my talk was filmed and was supposed to be made available. Nothing happened, and nothing happened to the paper I sent to them either, so I'm very glad to finally have a chance to publish something on FTL in my book.

References

Biretta, J.A., et al., 1999. Hubble space telescope observations of superluminal motion in the M87 jet. The Astrophysical Journal, 520, 2, 621-626. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1999ApJ...520..621B

Porcas, R., 1983. Superluminal motion - astronomers still puzzled. Nature, 302, 753-754. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1983Natur.302..753P

Rees, M.J., 1966. Appearance of relativistically expanding radio sources. Nature, 211, 468-470.

McCulloch, M.E., 2014. Physics from the Edge: a new cosmological model for inertia. World Scientific Publishing.

Saturday, 1 June 2013

A New Angle on Galactic Jets & FTL


Will Faster Than Light (FTL) travel ever be possible? Ultimately good observations, and not theory, will decide this, but, as I discussed in a previous blog, MiHsC suggests that the usual speed of light limit of relativity is flawed because it implies a constant speed, and therefore Unruh waves larger than the Hubble scale which are not observable.

If this is true, then where in nature might MiHsC act to accelerate something past the speed of light? One way to accelerate something with MiHsC is to move it towards the spin axis of another body. The object then sees lower mutual accelerations, loses inertial mass, and momentum conservation speeds it up anomalously. This prediction fits the flyby anomalies fairly well (McCulloch, 2008, see references below). MiHsC also predicts that the flyby anomaly can be much greater for larger, slowly rotating objects. Could the anomaly be so large that MiHsC accelerates something past the speed of light in this way?

Galaxies are pretty big objects and phenomena called galactic axial jets (jets shooting out along their spin axes) have been known for years. Biretta et al. (1999) looked at a particularly interesting one in M87. They looked at recognisable ‘knots’ of light within the jet, and found that they were moving at 6 times the speed of light (6c). It is important to note that Rees (1966) showed that the apparent speed of a relativistic object moving at an angle close to the line of sight (ie: jetting towards us) can appear to be superluminal, but that this is an optical illusion. There is a simple formula to calculate the ‘real’ speed from the apparent one and the angle. According to Biretta et al (1999) the most likely angle of the M87 jet to our line of sight is 64.5 degrees, and they said that because of the observed shape of the knots “placing the jet within 20 degrees of the line of sight presents several challenges”. If we assume the best guess angle of 64.5 degrees then the implied (real) velocity is still 3.7c (the apparent one is 6c). To get the implied velocity down below the speed of light you would have to assume an angle of less than 20 degrees, which they say is unrealistic.

There are more cases like this and, in a more statistically significant study presented at the Superluminal Workshop at Jodrell Bank Observatory in 1983, and mentioned in Porcas (1983), Schilizzi showed that the galactic jets with faster than light speeds did not extend from their galaxies any less than the sublight jets did. This suggests, if they're the same length, that the FTL jets are not close to our line of sight, and that their superluminal speeds might be real. However, this raises huge theoretical problems with causality, and of course there is the possibility that something is amiss with the jet observations, but I do believe that observations, and not old textbooks, will show the way.

Introduction to MiHsC

References:

Biretta, J.A., W.B. Sparks, F. Macchetto, 1999. Hubble space telescope observations of superluminal motion in the M87 jet. Astrophysical Journal, 520, 621-626. Free pdf

McCulloch, M.E., 2008. Modelling the flyby anomalies using a modification of inertia. Mon. Not. Royal. Astro. Soc., Letters, 389 (1), L57-60. Free pdf

Porcas, Richard (1983). "Superluminal motions: Astronomers still puzzled". Nature 302 (5911): 753. doi:10.1038/302753a0

Rees, M., 1966. Appearance of relativistically expanding radio sources. Nature, 211, 5048.