August 22, 2012—
Spacetime may be less like beer and more like sipping whiskey.
Or so an intergalactic photo finish would suggest.
Physicist Robert Nemiroff of Michigan Technological
University reached this heady conclusion after studying the tracings of three
photons of differing wavelengths that had been recorded by NASA’s Fermi
Gamma-ray Space Telescope in May 2009.
The photons originated about 7 billion light years away from
Earth in one of three pulses from a gamma-ray burst and arrived at the orbiting
telescope just one millisecond apart, in a virtual tie.
Gamma-ray bursts are short-lived bursts of gamma-ray
photons, the most energetic form of light. They can originate far across the
universe, and astronomers believe many are caused by giant stars collapsing,
often billions of years before the Earth was formed.