Australia: The Land Where Time Began

A biography of the Australian continent 

Gamma-Ray Bursts and Variation in the Speed of Light

The effect of quantum gravity can bring a tiny variation in light speed detectable through energetic photons propagating from gamma ray bursts (GRBs) to an observer, such as the space observatory. In this paper Xu & Ma report a surprising regularity of time lags that have been observed between photons of different energies with respect to the Lorentz violation factor, due to the light speed energy dependence, which was obtained by analysis of the energetic photon data of the GRBs that were observed by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. A linear form correction of the light speed ν(E) = c(E/E_LV), where E is the photon energy and E_LV = (3.60 ± 0.26) x 10¹⁷ GeV is the Lorentz violation scale measured by the energetic photon data of GRBs. The energy dependence of the light speed in cosmological space is supported by the results.

Xu, H. and B.-Q. Ma (2016). "Light speed variation from gamma-ray bursts." Astroparticle Physics 82: 72-76.