Quote:
Originally Posted by White Rabbit
An easy question, anyone can google the answer, but heres a slightly curly version.
If it takes about 8 min+/- for a photon of light to traval from the sun to here going by our clock, how much flight time does the photon experience by it's own clock due to time dilation?
I was reading the latest issue of Sky and Telescope and the cover story is on Superparticles. One of the blurbs in the article said that some of these particles traveling at near the speed of light are coming from light years away., sometime hundreds of light years but that the actual flight time for the particle was 20 min due to time dilation. This got me thinking about the question above.
Any ideas?
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It's a photon....it doesn't experience any time at all, since it's traveling at the speed of light. However from our perspective, it takes 8.3 minutes for the photon to zip across the distance from the Sun to the Earth. But if you take its flight time to Earth from the time the photon is produced in the core of the Sun, it's several million years. That's because of the density of the core and surrounding gases is such that every time the photon is emitted it only travels a minute distance before it's reabsorbed by another atom.
That travel time of 20 minutes for the 12 million Ly between Centaurus A and the earth was for a cosmic ray of extremely high energy. That's all the time it experiences in that distance due to time dilation.