Where do the photons go?

When a photon hits an electron,both moving in the same direction, the photon will be partially absorbed and the electron emits another photon with lower energy. This happens for example at linear particle accelerators. The energy from the photon partially goes over to the electron and the electron moves faster.

How do photons travel through matter?

When a photon interacts with matter, two things happen : 1) it picks up “rest mass” and 2) it slows down. This happens because regular matter is made up of charged particles like electrons and protons (one each in a Hydrogen atom).

What happens to the photons after they are absorbed?

The simplest answer is that when a photon is absorbed by an electron, it is completely destroyed. All its energy is imparted to the electron, which instantly jumps to a new energy level. The photon itself ceases to be. The opposite happens when an electron emits a photon.

What happens to photons at the edge of the universe?

Expanding bubble. This model says the universe will never stop expanding, and the universe will die because the energy all turns to photons and gets spread out so much. Bubble that will eventually collapse.

Where do light photons come from?

Fusion occurs in the sun’s innermost core, when two atoms merge, releasing energy and light in the process. Photons of light are first created in the sun’s center. Over tens of thousands of years, the photons travel a “drunken walk,” zigzagging their way from atom to atom until they reach the surface.

How does a photon move?

Photons are massless, so they always move at the speed of light in vacuum, 299792458 m/s (or about 186,282 mi/s). Like all elementary particles, photons are currently best explained by quantum mechanics and exhibit wave–particle duality, their behavior featuring properties of both waves and particles.

How does a photon see the universe?

A photon cannot see the Universe at all, because seeing requires interacting with other particles, antiparticles, or photons, and once such an interaction occurs, that photon’s journey is now over. According to any photon, its existence is instantaneous.

Where are photons created?

A photon is produced whenever an electron in a higher-than-normal orbit falls back to its normal orbit. During the fall from high energy to normal energy, the electron emits a photon — a packet of energy — with very specific characteristics.

Will all matter in the universe become photons in the future?

No. There is a misconception that a lot of laypeople seem to be picking up recently from popularizations, which is that all the matter in the universe will first be sucked into black holes, and then recycled into photons in the distant future through Hawking radiation, so that the only thing left will be photons. This is wrong.

What will the universe look like in the future?

The Universe will become a cold, uniform soup of isolated photons. The Universe we can currently see is made up of clumps of particles, dust, stars, black holes, galaxies, radiation (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScI) It’s not a particularly dramatic ending, although it does have a satisfying finality.

What is the energy of light in the universe?

However, the universe will contain photons with extremely low energies, which an observer (if one could be present and could detect them) would describe as Hawking radiation from the cosmological event horizon. [Hu 2011] These photons will have a temperature on the order of 10^-30 K, meaning typical energy of 10^-34 eV and a wavelength of 10^28 m.

What happens to energy as the universe expands?

So as the Universe expands, photons lose energy. But that doesn’t mean energy isn’t conserved; it means that the energy goes into the Universe’s expansion itself, in the form of work.