• The relativistic Christmas candle 🕯️

    With the advent of the Christmas time, it is common to put yourself a nice candle in the living room (or sometimes even four or more). It is particularly nice to enjoy the warm and dim orange light, softly flickering and creating a cozy atmosphere. As an astrophysicist researching the light emission from outflows moving at almost the speed of light towards us, I was wondering what would happen to such a Christmas candle if I would do the same thing to the candle – move it at the speed of light. Clearly, the airstream would blow out the candle and it wouldn’t burn if we put it into a…

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