3 ms·
> Stars That Race through Space at Nearly the Speed of Light > These hypervelocity stars move at up to 2 percent of the speed of light Either there is some se
by hirundo 6y ago
> Stars That Race through Space at Nearly the Speed of Light
> These hypervelocity stars move at up to 2 percent of the speed of light
Either there is some sense I'm missing in which 1/50th of C is "nearly" C, or this is a click bait and switch title.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoC is very large. Nothing goes that fast normally. Not by orders of magnitude. So 2% is huge. Our sun moves about the Milky Way at 828,000mph. 2% of the speed of light is around 13,000,000mph That's the speed where relativistic effects become important.
- taeric 6y agoStill doesn't mesh with the colloquial "nearly". :(
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- yesenadam 6y agoI think your sun speed should be km/h? Every website has a different figure, but they mostly seem to be around 500,000 miles/hr ~ 800,000 km/h.
- JoeAltmaier 5y agoYeah missed that, thanks. 536,000mph
- gpvos 6y agoThose two numbers are actually closer to each other than I expected.
- ganafagol 5y agoWhere they become important depends on your precision of measurenment. GPS satellites don't move at 2% the speed of light, but relativistic effects do play a role for the system to work since they need to be very precise in measuring and broadcasting time.
- tectonic 6y agoIt's odd that he didn't mention it in the writeup because his paper predicted that massive black hole binaries could accelerate stars to half the speed of light.