The leader of the research team that shocked the scientific world last year with findings that seemed to show that neutrinos can travel faster than light quit his post this week.
After further experiments cast grave doubts on the original results reported by Prof. Antonio Ereditato and scientists working on the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Tracking Apparatus (OPERA), some members of the research team wanted Ereditato to resign, according to the BBC.
For his part, the OPERA leader has not given a reason for his resignation.
The original OPERA experiment involved firing the subatomic particles for several years from the CERN particle accelerator in Switzerland at detectors at the OPERA facility in Gran Sasso, Italy about 450 miles away. Last September, OPERA scientists published results that stated they had measured the neutrinos arriving at their destination 60 nanoseconds faster than the "Universe's speed limit," 186,282 miles per second, should allow.
Those results understandably sent the scientific world into a tizzy. The published findings directly challenged the notion, established more than a century earlier by Albert Einstein in his special theory of relativity that the speed at which light travels is the absolute upper speed limit in the physical universe.
Other scientists quickly poked holes in the OPERA team's methods. Upon dropping the faster-than-light neutrino bombshell, Ereditato himself cautioned that his team may have gotten something wrong.
"We wanted to find a mistaketrivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effectsand we didn't," Ereditato said at the time, according to the BBC. "When you don't find anything, then you say, 'Well, now I'm forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinize this.'"
Earlier this month, the results of a second attempt at the OPERA experiment were published that offered up a very different story. Scientists found that the neutrinos traveled at the speed of light but did not exceed it.
While the members of Team ICARUS the scientists who re-ran OPERA's original experiments are confident that their results are the final nail in the coffin for the faster-than-light claims, additional experiments are nevertheless planned. It's expected that there will be a definitive, final answer on the notion of faster-than-light subatomic particle travel by May.
Additional reporting by David Murphy.