Does a photon travel in a straight line?
Photons do not travel in straight lines. To be technical, photons are both waves and particles. If photons were particles, they have deBroglie momentum , so in a Newtonian world, we expect Newton’s first law to apply.
How can a black hole bend light if light has no mass?
A black hole is a region of space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape, not even light. It might be surprising to you to hear that gravity can affect light even though light has no mass. The gravitational curvature of light’s path is a weak enough effect that we don’t notice it much on earth.
How does light get pulled into a black hole?
Once a particle of light (‘photon’) passes the ‘event horizon’ of a black hole, it can no longer escape, but there’s nothing to suggest that it is destroyed. Like matter, the photon is rapidly sucked towards the ‘singularity’ at the centre of the black hole, where a huge mass is packed into an infinitely small space.
How is light affected by a black hole?
Light rays that pass close to the black hole get caught and cannot escape. Therefore, the region around the black hole is a dark disk. Light rays that pass a little further away don’t get caught but do get bent by the black hole’s gravity. This makes the starfield appear distorted, as in a funhouse mirror.
How does photon travel?
As shown by Maxwell, photons are just electric fields traveling through space. Photons have no charge, no resting mass, and travel at the speed of light. Photons are emitted by the action of charged particles, although they can be emitted by other methods including radioactive decay.
How does a photon move through space?
As a photon moves through space, it exhibits oscillating electric and magnetic fields, and can interact with charged particles. These interactions slow it down, and cause it to move at a speed less than the speed of light as long as they’re in a material.
Does a photon really have no mass?
Since photons (particles of light) have no mass, they must obey E = pc and therefore get all of their energy from their momentum.
Do black holes bend light?
Black holes are regions in space-time where gravity’s pull is so powerful that not even light can escape its grasp. However, while light cannot escape a black hole, its extreme gravity warps space around it, which allows light to “echo,” bending around the back of the object.
Do photons bend space time?
Yes, photons bend spacetime.
What is the speed of a photon when it travels in an empty space?
Photons travel at the speed of light, 2.997×108 m/s in empty space. The speed of a photon through space can be directly derived from the speed of an electric field through free space.
What is the path a photon takes in bent space?
The photons follow the shortest possible path (called a geodesic) in bent space. When the space is not bent, or flat, then the shortest possible path is a straight line. When the space is bent with some spherical curvature, the shortest possible path lies actually on an equatorial circumference.
Why do photons always travel at the speed of light?
Some people say that the reason a photon travels at light speed the moment it is created is because it is a massless particle, and therefore must always travel at the speed of light. While it is true that the photon is massless and therefore always travels atcin all reference frames, this is not the reason that it is created already having a speed.
Is the bending of light caused by gravity?
If Newton’s gravitation could define the bending of light by gravity, then the general relativity wouldn’t have come up. Photons don’t have mass and it’s clear from the fact that it travels at the speed of light.
What is the mass of a photon?
Photons don’t have mass and it’s clear from the fact that it travels at the speed of light. Gravity is an illusion that seems to attract things but in fact it bends spacetime; which is why a straight path seems curved.