> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327246.800-13-more-things-mag... > "In 2005, researchers at the MAGIC gamma-ray telescope on La Palma in > the Canary Islands were studying gamma-ray bursts emitted by the black > hole in the centre of the Markarian 501 galaxy, half a billion light > years away. The burst's high-energy gamma rays arrived at the > telescope 4 minutes later than the lower-energy rays. Both parts of > the spectrum should have been emitted at the same time. So is the time > lag due to the high-energy radiation travelling slower through space? > That wouldn't make sense: it would contravene one of the central > tenets of special relativity. According to Einstein, all > electromagnetic radiation always travels through vacuum at the cosmic > speed limit the speed of light. The energy of the radiation should be > absolutely irrelevant."
What a crock of shit, and from New Scientist!
The space between here and a galaxy 500 million light years away is not a complete vacuum, in fact accumulated over 500 million light years each photon passes a *lot* of matter.
Light does go slower when not going through a vacuum, that's how lenses work. Its called diffraction. And this is frequency dependent, which is why cheap lenses have rainbow effects, this also has been known for centuries. And longer wavelengths are almost always affected more.
I bet even the short wavelengths were beaten to earth by the Neutrino flux, which actually outruns light in even the thinnest vacuums.
I expect the next paragraph of the New Scientist went on to explain this, and you just snipped it.
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