Does a photon actually travel?

Since photons are massless, they travel at c, which is called the speed of light because the photon was the first known example of a massless particle. Between interactions, photons don’t exist. You can’t watch a photon in transit, only detect an excitation of the electromagnetic field when it happens.

Do photons travel through the Earth?

Traveling Through Space No water, no waves. Because light consists of photons, however, it can travel through space like a stream of tiny particles.

What is the journey of a photon?

Over tens of thousands of years, the photons travel a “drunken walk,” zigzagging their way from atom to atom until they reach the surface. The light created deep in the sun’s core eventually emerges on the surface, where it can be directly observed for the first time.

How long does it take a photon to travel from the Sun to Earth?

eight minutes
A photon of light takes only eight minutes to get to the Earth from the surface of the Sun.

Do photons travel in a straight line?

Light only appears to travel in a straight line because humans are terrible precision instruments. 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 does the light from the Sun travel to Earth?

The Sun’s energy gets to the Earth through radiation, which you can prove just by standing outside and letting the sun’s rays warm your face on a sunny day. The energy lost is emitted as light or electromagnetic radiation. Energy that is absorbed by an atom causes its electrons to “jump” up to higher energy levels.

What happens to photons in the Sun?

The photons are repeatedly scattered by atomic nuclei and, after perhaps a million years, they reach the outer third of the Sun, known as the convection layer. Here the temperature is cool enough for atoms to absorb the photons. This couples the atoms and photons as they rise on convection currents.

How do photons leave the Sun?

The “sticking” eventually creates helium and also releases energy in the form of gamma-ray photons. Those photons make their way through the particles in the sun, losing some energy along the way and finally making their way out of the sun as x-rays, infrared and visible light.

How long does it take photons to escape the Sun?

Very approximately, this means that to travel the radius of the Sun, a photon will have to take (696,000 kilometers/1 centimeter)^2 = 5 x 10^21 steps. This will take, 5×10^21 x 3 x10^-11 = 1.5 x 10^11 seconds or since there are 3.1 x 10^7 seconds in a year, you get about 4,000 years.

What is the Sun really made up if not gas?

It does not have easily identifiable boundaries like rocky planets like Earth. Instead, the sun is composed of layers made up almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. These gases carry out different functions in each layer, and the sun’s layers are measured by their percentage of the sun’s total radius.