SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY

Intergalactic Race Ends in a Virtual Tie

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Astronomers announced Wednesday that a race halfway across the universe had ended in a virtual tie. And so the champion is still Albert Einstein--for now.

The race was between gamma rays of differing energies and wavelengths spit in a burst from an exploding star when the universe was half its present age. After a journey of 7.3 billion light-years, they arrived within nine-tenths of a second of each other in a detector on NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, at 8:22 p.m., Eastern time, last May 9.

Astronomers said the gamma-ray race was one of the most stringent tests yet of a bedrock principle of modern physics: Einstein's proclamation in his 1905 theory of relativity that the speed of light is constant and independent of its color, energy, direction or how you yourself are moving.