A New Record : A Freewrite
The new record is 186,000 miles per second. And it was set by the same team that held the previous record. They did this by firing a laser beam at a tiny particle of light called a “femtosecond” (which is one quadrillionth of a second). The first record for the fastest man-made vehicle was set by Helios, a Greek space probe that reached a speed of about 70,000 mph in 2005. The record was later broken by NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, which achieved a top speed of approximately 125,700 mph in 2018 while flying past the sun. The new record has been set by an international team of scientists, led by the University of Oxford. Using a high-energy laser and a cloud of rubidium atoms cooled to just 0.45 degrees above absolute zero, they managed to slow down light to below 299 thousandths of its normal speed in vacuum. As part of the research, published in Nature Photonics today [June 22], they also found that light can be made to travel faster than its usual speed limit in this same type of system. There are many things that people have done to break records, such as running the fastest marathon or swimming the longest distance in a pool. There are also many things that animals do that break records, such as the most kittens born at once or the longest time spent living inside of a house. In 2010, the team at CERN set a new record for the fastest man-made object by clocking it at more than 99.99% of the speed of light. The particle accelerator was able to accelerate protons within it to about 7,000 meters per second (m/s), or about 0.99999999c. They did this by using an ingenious method called radio frequency cavities which basically consist of a series of copper coils that are tuned so that they resonate at a specific frequency.