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Originally Posted by JustDisGuy
So anyone care to enlighten me on the physics of solar pressure (aka solar wind) based on the above explanations? If light has no mass, how can it propel something, even at a relatively insignifcant rate simply by reflecting from its surface?
I know I could Google for it, but it seems like a reasonable question to pose in this thread...  |
Even though a photon has no mass, it still has momentum and kinetic energy.
The equation for the total energy of an object is:
E^2 = p^2*c^2 + m^2*c^4
where p is the momentum, m is the mass, and c is the speed of light.
For massive particles with no velocity (and therefore no momentum), this reduces to the familiar E=mc^2. For massless particles, it reduces to E=pc, or rewritten, p=E/c. The energy of a photon is given by E=hw, where h is Planck's constant and w is the frequency of the photon.