Places found in the Universe where time can go back

Time is so simple and at the same timepoorly understood concept that philosophers and physicists of all times and peoples have tried to comprehend. The famous physicist Stephen Hawking believed that there are at least three areas of time that can distinguish the past from the future. So, according to the scientist, there are thermodynamic, cosmological and psychological arrows of time that describe the uniqueness of the past and the impossibility of changing it. However, even the arrows of the time of Stephen Hawking are not able to describe the processes that turn back the clock found in gamma-ray bursts.

Gamma-ray burst - a huge flash of gamma radiation, whose power can be a hundred times greater than the radiation power of our galaxy

What is gamma-ray burst?

Large-scale yet narrowly targeted ejectionenergy, comparable to the radiation of a galaxy and lasting only a few milliseconds to an hour, was first observed in the distant 1967 using American military satellites. It is believed that the gamma-ray burst that arose in our galaxy once provoked the mass extinction of living organisms on Earth about 500 million years ago. Currently, much to the happiness of mankind, the nearest such “death ray” is several billion light-years from Earth and does not pose any threat to our planet. At the same time, gamma-ray bursts may be interesting for another reason: they are able to turn back the clock in their area of ​​effect.

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Gamma-ray bursts can reverse time

According to a study by John Hickel and RobertNemirova, published in the Astrophysical Journal, usually gamma-ray bursts last from a few milliseconds to an hour. Short bursts with a lifespan of one second or so, as a rule, are formed as a result of the collision of neutron stars, which leads to the release of a huge amount of energy. Long gamma-ray bursts are associated with a supernova explosion.

The theory of Hakkil and Nemirov shows thata gamma-ray burst of any duration is an explosion of enormous power, which gives rise to a peculiar shock wave in a cloud of matter. Due to the fact that such a wave moves faster than electromagnetic radiation, inside its area there is not only the effect of time dilation, but also literally turning it back.

Sometimes moving into the past may not contradict standard physical laws

In any case, such a phenomenon is completely notcontrary to the basic tenets of modern physics and the theory of relativity. Despite the fact that the theory developed by Albert Einstein claims that the speed of matter cannot exceed the speed of light in vacuum, it does not at all exclude the possibility of its superluminal propagation in a dense cloud of matter.

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The effect of time travel, in this casearises because the shock wave is slightly ahead of the resulting gamma radiation in speed, which leads to the fact that for an outside observer such a wave looks like a message from the distant past.