If we shoot a burst of light from our most powerful laser into space…how far could it travel before fading, it it doesn’t hit anything? And would it travel straight?
In: Physics
It will never fade. The reason light fades on earth is because we have an atmosphere, there’s tons of little particles like nitrogen, oxygen, water, dust, etc. that photons can run into as they leave a light source, which means there’s only so far they can go before they’re bound to run into something. In space there’s next to nothing for photons to run into, so they will fly on as long as it takes to hit something. This is why we are able to see stars that are ~100,000,000,000,000 miles away, there was nothing between that star and us, and the earth was the first thing that photon of light ran into.
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