Does Sunlight Weigh Anything?
Answers
Explanation:
Short Answer: Yes (by weight we mean mass)
Explanation: Sunlight, composed of photons, reaching the Earth definitely has equivalent mass. That’s the reason the area covered in shadow weighs less than the area being pushed by light.
The sunlight emitted in a day would be around 3.7*1024 kg. If you collect all the sunlight in a perfect mirror box, the mass of the box will increase by that amount (because of the photon energy). Furthermore, freely streaming mass-less protons are deflected by gravitational fields.
On a sunny day, Chicago weighs 140 kilograms more, simply because sunlight is falling on it.
Answer:
Light is composed of photons, which have no mass, so therefore light has no mass and can't weigh anything. ... Because photons have energy -- and, as Einstein taught us, energy is equal to the mass of a body, multiplied by the speed of light squared