Could faster-than-light supernova remnants form a star system?
Most current planets, and any inhabitants living on them, are ultimately the product of long-dead supernovas that exploded and sent matter across the universe, where it eventually got caught with other supernova remnants and spiraled into an accretion disc which formed the star system.
With that knowledge, we can say that humans, and therefore human consciousness, are ultimately made of dead stars.
When we look up and see stars, we're actually seeing them as they were in the distant past, because the light from those stars hasn't reached us yet.
I had a thought, that if the supernova remnants traveled faster than light, we could potentially be made of supernovas that look like they haven't exploded yet, since the light from the explosion hasn't reached us yet.
Would it be possible to have a world that's constructed of faster-than-light ejecta from a supernova, where the people on the world don't realize those stars have already gone supernova?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/28791. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
When reading "faster than light" one normally thinks of it as faster than the limit speed of relativity, which is the same as the speed of light in relativity, as the photon is massless and therefore goes with that limit speed.
But in your case, you literally are interested in the matter arriving earlier than the light arrives. Therefore another possibility would be an universe where the photon isn't massless, but has a very small, but finite mass. In such an universe, the speed of actual light would be slower that "light speed" (which in that universe would, of course, not reasonably be called the speed of light, but something like "limit speed" or "invariant speed"), and therefore there could in principle be supernova matter that travels faster than the speed of the star's light.
Note that unlike a particle that actually goes faster than the limit speed of relativity, a non-massless photon would be only a minor change to our physics. Basically, one would have to introduce a non-zero interaction between photon and Higgs boson. If the photon mass is sufficiently small, it would not make a noticeable difference on earth (that is, chemistry, electricity and all that would work just as normal) and only show up over galactic distances or measurements of extreme precision.
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