| / English Dictionary |
SPEED OF LIGHT
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
The speed at which light travels in a vacuum; the constancy and universality of the speed of light is recognized by defining it to be exactly 299,792,458 meters per second
Synonyms:
c; light speed; speed of light
Classified under:
Nouns denoting time and temporal relations
Hypernyms ("speed of light" is a kind of...):
constant (a number representing a quantity assumed to have a fixed value in a specified mathematical context)
speed; velocity (distance travelled per unit time)
Context examples:
Though astronomers are uncertain of the shape and temperature of coronas, they know that they contain particles that move close to the speed of light.
(NuSTAR sees rare blurring of black hole light, NASA)
By multiplying this amount of time by the speed of the particles, which is nearly the speed of light, scientists determine the maximum distance traveled.
(NuSTAR Probes Black Hole Jet Mystery, NASA)
This is because the neutron star’s intense magnetic field pulls the particles from the pulsar’s surface and accelerates them to nearly the speed of light.
(NASA’s Fermi Mission Links Nearby Pulsar’s Gamma-ray ‘Halo’ to Antimatter Puzzle, NASA)
A physical quantity that is constant in all circumstances throughout the universe (e.g., speed of light c, elementary charge, the gravitational constant G).
(Fundamental Physical Constant, NCI Thesaurus)
The favored explanation for short gamma-ray bursts is that they're caused by a jet of debris moving near the speed of light produced in the merger of neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole.
(NASA Missions Catch First Light from a Gravitational-Wave Event, NASA)
As material in the disk falls toward the black hole, some of it forms dual jets that blast subatomic particles straight out of the disk in opposite directions at nearly the speed of light.
(WISE, Fermi Missions Reveal a Surprising Blazar Connection, NASA)
During the final fraction of a second, the two black holes collide into each other at nearly one-half the speed of light and form a single more massive black hole, converting a portion of the combined black holes' mass to energy, according to Einstein's formula E=mc2.
(Gravitational Waves Detected 100 Years After Einstein's Prediction, NASA)
Its brightness is amplified due to its high speed in our direction, but even more so because of what scientists call relativistic effects, which arise because the material in the jet is traveling near the speed of light.
(The Giant Galaxy Around the Giant Black Hole, NASA)
They travel at speeds just shy of the speed of light and rarely interact with other matter, allowing them to travel unimpeded across distances of billions of light-years.
(NASA’s Fermi Traces Source of Cosmic Neutrino to Monster Black Hole, NASA)
You feel your way with the speed of light, by some hyperrational process, to truth.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
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