Because of this universal speed limit, telescopes are essentially time machines.When astronomers look at a star 500 light-years away, they're looking at light from 500 years ago. Light from around ...

The suggestion that the speed of light can change is based on data collected by UNSW astronomer John Webb, who posed a conundrum when he found that light from a distant quasar, a star-like object ...

The idea that stars live in galaxies has been astronomy’s conventional wisdom since the 1920’s. It took a serious hit recently, though, when observers concluded that as many as half the stars ...

The disrupted stars are then spread into a stream of gas long before they can get close enough to the black hole’s horizon to reach the speed of light, as shown in the Ph.D. thesis of my former ...

Light in water goes even slower - water’s refractive index is 1.33, so the speed of light in water is slowed by 74,384,595 meters per second. If you have a sufficiently dense material, light can ...

In a new study, scientists discovered the fastest of these stars, S4714, which orbits around Sgr A* at more than 8% of light speed, or 15,000 miles per second (24,000 km/second), faster than any ...

That’s very close to the speed of light, but not quite faster than it. Indeed, to our knowledge so far, nothing on or off our planet can travel faster than the speed of light.

In the "Star Trek" TV shows and films, the U.S.S. Enterprise's warp engine allows the ship to move faster than light, an ability that is, as Spock would say, "highly illogical." However, there's a ...

A jet of radiation from two colliding neutron stars appears to be travelling at seven times the speed of light, according to measurements from the Hubble Space Telescope. Although this is merely ...