this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2025
782 points (97.7% liked)

Science Memes

13995 readers
2484 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.

Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
782
Photons (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
42 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

https://www.instagram.com/wtframecomics/

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ryedaft 53 points 2 months ago (5 children)

Photons don't gather energy and they definitely don't move slowly through the sun.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)
  1. They're traveling in a medium, so they move slower than in space
  2. Due to the random walk caused by multiple scattering, it can take millions of years for a photon to escape the sun after being produced in the core.

You are right that they don't gather energy, but they do multiply. What would be a single high energy x ray in the core will eventually downscatter into an army of optical photons.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 months ago (2 children)

It can definitely take millions of years for photons to leave a star due to dense protons causing collisions.

https://futurism.com/photons-million-year-journey-center-sun

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I get what you're saying but taking a long time is not the same as moving slowly

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Slowly making their way does not equal moving slowly. It describes the time it takes to exit the sun, not the speed of the particle.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

fair enough

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

They’re also rapidly making their way and taking a long time.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

And cold wind is when slow-moving air hits you at a fast speed.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

v = d / t, so technically it is.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

but the distance the photon travels is very large, just in random directions

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I know I was being pedantic about your comment because I thought it was kinda funny interpreting it out of context.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

For photons, their moving relatively slow from the inside to the outside of the sun. Although, I think, it's technically a bunch of photons bumping each other into existence.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

... they definitely don't move slowly through the sun.

They kind of do. While the photons inside the Sun move at a very high speed, they can take up to about 170,000 years to get from the middle of the Sun to the outside, because they change directions a lot on the way.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

also temperature doesn't really exist at that scale.