If photons are affected by gravity, therefore they have mass.?

Question

Why can photons travel 186,000 miles/sec and the space shuttle cant? Do they not both have mass?

Answer 1

Photons do not have rest mass.

Gravity affects space, so what happens is that the light is unaffected but the space it travels through is. Just like a curve in the road, a car follows the road...

Answer 2

What someone above said is correct. Gravity affects space. That's why the paths of photons can be curved by gravity. It is the space being affected not the photon.

Imagine, objects with mass warp space. The more the mass the greater the wrapping. A black whole is actually considered to have warped space so much that it has punched a whole in it. The "shape" of the warping of space for a black whole would be much like one of those coin spirals you find in your local shopping mall. So a photon would behave like a penny, rolling straight, but ever being pulled into the center of the black whole by the manner in which space has been warped.

Bad joke for the day: Photons don't have mass because they're not Catholic. Happy Sunday.

Answer 3

No, they do not both have mass. Photons move along curves in space-time called null-geodesics. Objects with mass cannot move along such curves. But both types of curve are affected by curvature in space-time, which is what gravity is.

The space shuttle goes a *lot* slower than light. The fastest space probe we have made has gone around 150,000 miles per hour (that is less than light goes in one second). The reason they don't go faster isn't the result of basic physics, it is simply a result of our level of technology. That they can't go as fast as the speed of light is basic physics.

Answer 4

The photon does not if it did u would not be able to see more than 50 light years in space . the only gravity that affects photons is a black hole.

Answer 5

photons have momentum but they don't have mass and no one knows for sure.maybe since it the speed of time it affects the momentum photons travel at??? for the record, no one's been able to measure the speed of gravity so maybe how gravity affects light is like how light reacts to matter: light is both wave and a particle depending on what it interacts with so maybe gravity can only affect mass and massless objects at a certain speed?



Vin

Answer 6

Photons have zero mass. They have a mass equivalent: the amount of mass that would be created if a photon was converted into mass.

It would take infinite energy for anything with mass to travel at the speed of light -- unless the mass was converted into energy first.

Answer 7

this is one of the fundamental laws of quantum behaviour- PHOTONS DO NOT HAVE MASS!
remember that!

because photons do not have mass, they are free to travel anywhere they please, however they please, taking whatever path they please, and with different speeds through different mediums.
since photons do not have mass, they can travel at 186,000 miles per second (through vacuum). if a space shuttle didn't have mass, i doubt there'd be anything stopping it from travelling at such high speeds as well. but, unfortunately, space shuttles have a lot of mass, limiting their speed.

Answer 8

Photons do not have mass, but they do possess momentum Photons are affected by gravitational fields not because photons have mass, but because gravitational fields (in particular, strong gravitational fields) change the shape of space-time. The photons are responding to the curvature in space-time, not directly to the gravitational field.

Answer 9

Photons are not purely particle or wave so they have the characteristics of both. Also photons have gigantic energy of the sun lunching them, shuttle on the other hand will never have enought fuel to reach that speed.

Answer 10

photons are massless.

the energy required to get a massive vehile to even approach sthe speed of light is emmence and if an object with mass did go to light speed it would convert to energy.
pilots no likey that.