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sjf911 sjf911 is offline
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Originally Posted by Moses View Post
Well, sort of.

http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/960731.html

From Interview with Michael Turner, University of Chicago.

Q: Do photons have mass? If not, why does the gravitational field of a star bend passing light?

A: No, photons do not have mass according the present definition of mass. The modern definition assigns every object just one mass, an invariant quantity that does not depend on velocity, says Dr. Matt Austern a computer scientist at AT&T Labs Research. Under this definition, mass is proportional to the total energy, Eo, of the object at rest.

"A particle like a photon is never at rest and always moves at the speed of light; thus it is massless," says Dr. Michael S. Turner, chair of the Department of Astrophysics at the University of Chicago.

What about experimental evidence? Experiments don't determine exact quantities because of small errors inherent in making measurements. We have, however, put an upper limit on the photon rest mass. In 1994, the Charge Composition Explorer spacecraft measured the Earth's magnetic field and physicists used this data to define an upper limit of 0.0000000000000006 electron volts for the mass of photons, with a high certainty in the results.

This number is close to zero; it is equivalent to 0.00000000000000000000039 times the mass of an electron (the lightest particle), says Turner.
IIRC, there was some work done on estimation of the upper limit of photon mass using "galactic" magnetic field interactions that suggested another 10 orders of magnitude smaller upper limit although don't ask me how you can measure galactic magnetic field dynamics from earth.
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Old 05-18-2009, 08:47 AM
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