How to Use relativistic in a Sentence

relativistic

adjective
  • Some pairs of relativistic jets can stretch out over more than a million light years, wider than the arms of their host galaxies.
    — Kiona N. Smith, Space.com, 9 Dec. 2025
  • The stack of runaway relativistic avalanches could explain the gamma rays.
    — Quanta Magazine, 6 May 2026
  • The proton is a collection of quarks and gluons moving at relativistic speeds around a central point.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 3 Apr. 2023
  • As this magnetic snap occurred, matter was flung outward at relativistic speeds.
    — Neetika Walter, Interesting Engineering, 9 Dec. 2025
  • The quest to reconcile the quantum and relativistic worldviews has occupied physics for decades.
    — Adam Frank, Discover Magazine, 12 July 2023
  • Which is not to imply half the country is purely rational and the other are relativistic nutcases.
    — Christopher Borrelli, chicagotribune.com, 11 Sep. 2017
  • The problem is viewing it from a special relativistic perspective.
    — Big Think, 1 May 2026
  • All the principles of classical physics are fully intact in the relativistic context.
    — Sean Carroll, Quanta Magazine, 14 Nov. 2022
  • Yet relativistic effects don’t usually play a huge role in the chemical behavior of most light elements.
    — Stephanie Pappas, Scientific American, 14 May 2024
  • The engine accelerates ions confined in a loop to moderate relativistic speeds, and then varies their velocity to make slight changes to their mass.
    — Fox News, 16 Oct. 2019
  • As their orbit tightens, the relativistic precession of the stars speeds up, while the planet’s precession slows down, because the stars act more like a single object from far away.
    — Rupendra Brahambhatt, Interesting Engineering, 31 Jan. 2026
  • Here the relativistic effects predicted by Einstein must be taken into account.
    — Martin Rees, Scientific American, 18 Aug. 2020
  • The scientists were using a super-heavy ion linear accelerator to bombard atoms with ions as heavy as uranium at relativistic speeds.
    — Connor Lynch, Discover Magazine, 19 Oct. 2021
  • Fascinatingly, relativistic effects, such as time dilation and length contraction, start to happen when speeds exceed one-tenth the speed of light.
    — Isaac Schultz / Gizmodo, Quartz, 2 Apr. 2024
  • At the center is a visualization of a powerful jet of radiation and particles known as a relativistic jet.
    — Samuel Sanders, Smithsonian Magazine, 13 Sep. 2024
  • Here’s a rundown of some of the big news from the first 24 hours of the meeting which, due to some weird kind of relativistic time dilation, represents about a week for our intrepid reporters.
    — Adam Feuerstein , Matthew Herper, STAT, 1 June 2024
  • This rapid spin can drag spacetime around the black hole, a phenomenon known as frame dragging, and may also help power the enormous relativistic jets observed in active galaxies.
    — Kaif Shaikh, Interesting Engineering, 29 June 2026
  • Tracking neutrinos to their source would help astronomers understand the physics behind extreme environments, like the relativistic jets of a blazar, beyond what light alone can tell us.
    — Erika K. Carlson, Discover Magazine, 12 July 2018
  • Only about 1% of tidal disruption events result in relativistic jets (or beams moving at close to the speed of light) that launch plasma and radiation from the poles of a rotating black hole.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN, 30 Nov. 2022
  • Whether as a monolithic mirror or a fancy interferometric array, the telescope would be so big that relativistic effects would come into play.
    — Phil Plait, Scientific American, 20 Feb. 2026
  • The swarm could be made of many individual collectors placed all around the different parts of a black hole in order to best collect from the accretion disk, the corona, and the relativistic jets.
    — Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 6 Sep. 2021
  • Such intense inflow of matter can create powerful relativistic jets, narrow streams of particles and radiation launched from near the black hole’s poles at nearly the speed of light.
    — Rupendra Brahambhatt, Interesting Engineering, 14 Mar. 2026
  • Artist's conception of a tidal disruption event (TDE) that happens when a supermassive black hole tears apart a star and launches a relativistic jet.
    — Erika K Carlson, Discover Magazine, 14 June 2018
  • Other atomic-scale carbon, like graphene, has shown excellent conductivity with electrons hitting relativistic speeds.
    — John Wenz, Popular Mechanics, 15 Aug. 2019
  • So, were Dwyer’s runaway relativistic avalanches really happening inside clouds?
    — Quanta Magazine, 6 May 2026
  • Its relativistic quantum fields still live in Euclid’s continuum—or more precisely, in Einstein’s update.
    — Frank Wilczek, WSJ, 4 Feb. 2022
  • One of the risks during the instabilities are runaway electrons, which accelerate to relativistic energies and can slam into the walls of the reaction chamber.
    — ArsTechnica, 9 June 2026
  • The environment in which a lightning bolt forms typically has some loose electrons, and these get rapidly accelerated to relativistic speeds by the intense electrical fields.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 10 Dec. 2019
  • Eventually, it is literally ripped apart, its material subsumed into an orbiting accretion flow that either falls into the black hole or gets shot out as a relativistic jet.
    — Smithsonian Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, 6 Jan. 2022
  • Use the momentum principle along with relativistic momentum to calculate the final velocity of the spacecraft.
    — Rhett Allain, WIRED, 31 May 2018

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'relativistic.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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